[uf-discuss] Enumerating Microformats on a Page

[Antonio Touriño]

On 3/24/06, Scott Reynen <scott at randomchaos.com> wrote:
> On Mar 24, 2006, at 7:25 PM, Phil Haack wrote:
> > But many sites do present a sitemap already for humans first.  I
> > think it's quite helpful when a site does have one.  Not everyone
> > will generate them, true, but a sitemap can also represent a
> > logical structure that isn't necessary reflective of a filesystem
> > structure.
> I don't expect they'll do much good, but I don't see how they could
> hurt anything, so if you think it will help, I'd say go ahead and
> work on it.

It could hurt in the longrun in the sense that if we have sitemaps and
we do not update them to reflect the true (logical or physical)
structure of our site then parser writers are not going to bother with
them as they will find them unreliable. Maybe I am wrong, maybe they
will write something like the mozilla quirks or standard mode, but I
really don't think we would want to go down that slippery slope. A
sitemap if we implement something like it should be derived
automatically using a tool to have a reasonable chance of making it
useful. Requiring yet another tool (other than a text editor. Kudos to
the Dreamweaver uF plugin people, btw!) to produce truly useful and
meaningful sitemap is not realistic and not human friendly. I think
that is my point.

> > The sitemap itself can be content for the end users.  If one
> > existed, wouldn't we want to take advantage of it?
> I'd want to take advantage of it to decide where to start, but not
> where to end.  A search engine should seek to maximize the search
> area to improve results.  I want to look at everything on your site,
> unless instructed otherwise.

If there are cases in which you might not want to believe the sitemap.
what are they? How are you going to distinguish them? If you are going
to selectively chose when to rely on a sitemap then I don't see the
point to it. Again, I think it's a slippery slope we don't want to go
down on.


>  If a site map doesn't reflect the content, you have
> false information about what something contains.
>

Precisely.

On the other hand, I just realized I am arguing something that I have
no solid proof of and haven't done the due diligence of finding out
how sitemaps are working out for people right now. But I am sending
the email anyway in hopes of maybe someone picking an idea and running
with it, or tearing it to bits... ;)

Cheers,
Antonio


--
Antonio Touriño
Consultor en Tecnologías Web
Brilliance Tech