[uf-discuss] uF Discovery?

[Scott Reynen]

Brian Suda wrote:

> the advantage of saying what you have available will minumized the
> crawl space. I can get one file that tells me everything, or crawl the
> entire 40,000 Avon hCard pages to try to get the same thing.

This seems counter to the DRY and/or users-first mantra of  
microformats.  If Avon made all microformats available in a single  
file distinct from their existing user-focused navigation structure,  
why would they bother keeping the user-focused data microformatted?   
If they do keep it, it's repetition, and if they don't keep it, it's  
separating user data and machine data.  And at the point, why would  
they use microformats at all?

> Look at Google Sitemaps, that is a single file that describes the
> pages on the site, along with last-update time. This helps to limit
> un-needed crawls, bandwidth, time, etc.

But Google says [1] "Please note that the Sitemap Protocol  
supplements, but does not replace, the crawl-based mechanisms that  
search engines already use to discover URLs."  So it's not actually  
limiting un-needed crawls; it's only pointing to things that wouldn't  
be found by crawling the user-centric website, which in my  
understanding should not include microformats.

Peace,
Scott

[1] http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/docs/en/protocol.html