Arve Bersvendsen wrote:
> Actually, Google Sitemaps is already compatible with [Atom].
Yes, I've had a number of folk send me mail pointing to the FAQ that
I did not read as closely as I should. In fact, it is great that Google is
willing to accept Atom 0.3 files instead of just their Sitemap format.
Hopefully, this move will encourage many traditional web sites to start
producing Atom files to serve the role of "Rich Site Summaries" and allow us
to expand our feed services to cover non-blogs as well.
I do still think it unfortunate that Google felt compelled to invent
yet-another-format for Sitemaps. Because of Google's support for the Sitemap
format, it is inevitable that aggregation services are going to have to
start reading Sitemaps in addition to the billions of flavors of legacy RSS
and Atom files. Nonetheless, given the importance of any format that Google
supports, should we be considering providing support in Atom for the
priority element or some easily mapped equivelant? Also, I wonder what it
will take to get Google so say that they'll support Atom 1.0? It seems
obvious that they would, but it would be nice to know when they expect to do
it...
The Sitemap Index files are proper and useful additions to what we
have now in the blogosphere and we should look carefully at either trying to
figure out how to incorporate this idea into what we do for Atom. Perhaps
something along the lines of Sitemap indexes could be incorporated into the
autodiscovery specification?
bob wyman
