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[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] "SMDL"--work in progress
 Hi all, This is my first posting to xml-dev, as I'm still getting comfortable the XML specification. However, as an exercise I have begun putting together a first XML DTD (hopefully to be put together) which I'm tentatively calling the "Site Map Definition Language" or SMDL. (The name will most likely change.) The are currently hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of grouped collections of documents on the WWW which we often refer to individually at "sites." We can use XML to define the various types of information out there in a uniform language. We can further classify these different types of documents into groups, the most common of which right now is the idea of the Web site. Right now, the structure of any given site is usually laid out in a tree of documents. However, we have not yet seen a uniform way for expressing--in a single document--the contents of this tree. This has resulted in non-standard "site maps," which vary greatly between different locations on the Web. Compounding this is the fact that these maps, though often friendly to the user surfing the web, are highly machine unreadable (which is, of course, a general problem with HTML). That is, automated web robots dispatched by the major search engines have no easy way of gaining quick access to the layout of an individual site. These engines must then result to recursively searching sites for linked documents. This poses a problem for both the web content provider, who may have robots accessing and cataloging pages not meant to be cataloged; it also poses a problem to the web robots themselves, which have the time consuming and bandwidth hogging task of requesting several pages in the hopes of keep a database up-to-date. SMDL is a work in progress to solve the above problems. With it, I hope to define a uniform language which web content providers can use to offer both user agents and robots access to the full structure of a site--including information about the tree-like layout of a site; the frequency of updates of a particular resource; whether content is dynamic or not (now, with html files, for instance, the web robot cannot necessarily know if a page is server-parsed); and other information. Obviously there are a lot of possibilities. This is why I'm coming to the group a bit early to get feedback. What would you include in such a language? Also, is this a worthwhile endeavor? My proposal now is very small, and no doubt missing some important elements. (Again, I will post very soon; I want to make sure I've eliminated obvious DTD errors.) It's mainly an exercise as an early XML application. So don't be afraid to say it's unnecessary (I doubt you would anyhow) and anything else. I appreciate any feedback at all. Thanks in advance. I look forward to further participation in this group, especially with the somewhat exciting XSchema specification. Adam mailto:adam@c... xml-dev: A list for W3C XML Developers. To post, mailto:xml-dev@i... Archived as: http://www.lists.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/xml-dev/ To (un)subscribe, mailto:majordomo@i... the following message; (un)subscribe xml-dev To subscribe to the digests, mailto:majordomo@i... the following message; subscribe xml-dev-digest List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (mailto:rzepa@i...) 
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