sitemap-brainstorming

<entry-title>Sitemap Brainstorming</entry-title>

Per the microformats process this page documents attempts to brainstorm a sitemap and related mechanisms microformat.

Note : We define 'site mapping' as the process of generating a particular sitemap flavour, like sitemap.xml or an HTML sitemap, or something related like an HTML5 cache manifest.

Note : Here we are attempting to derive a simple mechanism, lowest common denominator and driven by a top level HTML nav mechanism. We are not considering crawlers etc just yet. It is possible that later when/if we look at crawlers we may need to encode some kind of order information (for now this is explicitly defined in the order the author defined the link elements).

Content and class values

• mapmf (shorthand for map microformat), required
  • mapmf can be used to declare a link element as something the author wants considered when site mapping occurs
  • mapmf would be required to generate all the different sitemap and related mechanisms, HTML sitemap, sitemap.xml and cache manifest
• priority, optional
  • priority is only pertinent to sitemap.xml
  • a first iteration for defining possible values could be (p0|p1|p2|p3|p4|p5|p6|p7|p8|p9|one)
  • p0 = 0.0, p1 = 0.1, one = 1.0
  • if the author fails to specify a priority it is sane to assume a machine may generate the default of 0.5 as per the sitemaps.org protocol
• changefreq, optional
  • changefreq is only pertinent to sitemap.xml
  • we can lift the possible values directly out of the sitemaps.org protocol (always|hourly|daily|weekly|monthly|yearly|never)

Note : We ignore 'lastmod' for now (again only pertinent to sitemap.xml)

Examples

Simple HTML sitemap or cache manifest example

<ul>
  <li>
    <a href="http://www.site.tld/" class="mapmf">Home</a>
  </li>
  <li>
    <a href="http://www.site.tld/section1/" class="mapmf">Section 1</a>
  </li>
</ul>

sitemap.xml example with changefreq specified

<ul>
  <li>
    <a href="http://www.site.tld/" class="mapmf daily">Home</a>
  </li>
  <li>
    <a href="http://www.site.tld/section1/" class="mapmf weekly">Section 1</a>
  </li>
</ul>

sitemap.xml example with changefreq and priority specified

<ul>
  <li>
    <a href="http://www.site.tld/" class="mapmf daily one">Home</a>
  </li>
  <li>
    <a href="http://www.site.tld/section1/" class="mapmf weekly p8">Section 1</a>
  </li>
</ul>