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).

Brainstorming solution 1

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>