Four recordings, and a length that read as infinite
Our demos page hosts four real screen recordings and told crawlers nothing about them. Each clip now has an address and a description, every number measured.
The demos page on this site is four screen recordings of the running product: a guest ordering from a phone, a sale on the till, the kitchen board mid-service, and a tour of the back office. They are real captures of real screens, hosted on our own domain, and until this week the page said nothing a search engine could read about any of them. The only structured data on it was the same block every page carries, which describes the product and not a video. And from the whole site, exactly one page linked to it from its prose: a blog post.
We read a rival’s demos page first, the way every one of these passes starts. Theirs embeds a video platform’s player and carries no video markup either, so the gap was open on both sides. Ours is the one that hosts its own files, which is exactly the case the video markup was designed for: it wants a direct address for the file, a frame to show, a date and a length.
Every number was measured, not typed
The length was the interesting one. A recording made by a browser’s own recorder is a file with no duration in its header, so when you ask a video element how long it is, it answers Infinity. It only learns the real figure if you seek past the end and let it find the last frame. So that is what we did, in a real browser, for all four: forty-one and fifty-seven seconds for the two phone journeys, twelve and fourteen for the board and the office, with the frame sizes read off the same files. The recording date is the one commit that has ever touched the clips, so it is a fact from the history rather than a guess.
Each clip also has an anchor now, made from its file name, so a page can point at the recording of the till sale rather than at the top of a page of four. Four money pages use that: the register page links the till clip at the sentence that describes a real sale on our test venue, the kitchen page links the board clip, the ordering page links the guest clip, and the stock page links the office tour. No new copy was written. The sentences were already there; they link now.
What keeps it honest
A test reads the built page and checks that every file the markup names exists on disk and is the same file the page’s own video element plays, so the description can never drift away from the thing it describes. It checks the date is a real past date, the lengths are whole seconds, and the frame sizes are the ones measured. With the two source files set aside and the site rebuilt, six of its seven checks failed by name. Markup that outruns the files would be the machine-readable version of a false claim, and this site’s one rule is that nothing on it may be untrue.