--On June 7, 2005 3:17:04 AM -0700 gstein <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > "proprietary" connotes closed. We published the spec and encourage > other search engines to use it. There is no intent to close or control it.
"Proprietary" means "owned". Google clearly owns "Google Sitemaps". The license requires derivative works to keep the same license. That is control. It was designed in isolation, for Google's use. That is a closed spec. For example, the priority element is not specified well enough for another engine to implement it compatibly. Does it apply to ranking, crawl order or duplicate preference? An open process would have at least looked at the proposed extensions for robots.txt and earlier formats like Infoseek sitelist.txt. wunder -- Walter Underwood Principal Architect, Verity