[whatwg] Menus, fallback, and backwards compatibility: ideas wanted

[Sander Tekelenburg]

At 00:42 +0000 UTC, on 2005/12/15, Ian Hickson wrote:

> On Tue, 13 Dec 2005, Alexey Feldgendler wrote:

[...]

>> One possible solution that comes to my mind is describing a site map
>> with some tree of nested elements, with page titles, URIs and other meta
>> information, but without any presentational information. As this site
>> map is common for all or most pages of a site, it could be included as
>> an external XML resource.
>
> Many people have tried this kind of thing in the past, with little
> success. As far as I can tell, there is little interest from Web authors
> in describing their site map (which is more a graph than a tree, and which
> is getting all the more dynamic with things like wikis).
>
> My theory is that there is an inverse relationship between the level of
> abstraction involved and the level of interest from authors. Site maps in
> external files are a kind of abstraction beyond most authors.

While that is certainly true, at the same time there appears to be a strong
trend towards using automated Web publishing systems (CMSs, wikis, blogs,
forums, etc.). Such a system will often 'know' already what the sitemap 'is'
and could thus probably easily generate it automagically. I think it would
make sense to adjust a spec not only to what human HTML authors can/will use,
but also take into account what automated systems can/will.

(Btw, I don't know if it would have to be a 'sitemap'. The profile attribute
to HEAD seems to apply to this.)


-- 
Sander Tekelenburg, <http://www.euronet.nl/~tekelenb/>