Re: Google Sitemaps: Yet another "RSS" or site-metadata format and Atom "competitor"
--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
RE: Google Sitemaps: Yet another "RSS" or site-metadata format and Atom "competitor"
Greg Stein wrote: > It was not published "to muddy the waters". That implies a specific > intent which was *definitely* not present. Please accept my apologies for what was poor writing. I can see how you read my sentence as implying intent to muddy. It wasn't my intent, however, to imply that. I should have written. "publishing this new format *and* muddying the waters." My intent was to say that publishing the format has the effect of muddying the waters. I wasn't trying to say that Google was intentionally doing this. > "proprietary" connotes closed. I'm using the older definition of proprietary which means simply "not standard." I see nothing wrong with saying "open and proprietary" format... I don't think one implies the exclusion of the other. > How about this: you have a web site with 10 *million* URLs on it. > What format are you going to use? Is Atom appropriate at that scale? No. I don't think Atom would work well with 10 million URLs. At least not as currently defined. I do think, however, that it would have been useful to try to at least have a conversation about defining some subset of Atom that would address the need. I think a result could have ended up looking much like the Sitemap format but offered a smoother migration path from Atom as we know it to the more terse format and the reverse. Please understand that I think that on-the-whole, the efforts by Google to popularize the Sitemap process and "syndication" by non-blogs is absolutely wonderful! I'm only grumbling about the formats... bob wyman
Re: Google Sitemaps: Yet another "RSS" or site-metadata format and Atom "competitor"
On 6/4/05, Bob Wyman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >... >I think it would be really wonderful if we were to find that > non-blog web sites start producing this data. My only regret is that Google > has confused matters by publishing this new format to muddy the waters... It was not published "to muddy the waters". That implies a specific intent which was *definitely* not present. >... > can exploit. This could be a good thing for Atom -- if we can convince > people to use it instead of the Google proprietary format. If we don't "proprietary" connotes closed. We published the spec and encourage other search engines to use it. There is no intent to close or control it. How about this: you have a web site with 10 *million* URLs on it. What format are you going to use? Is Atom appropriate at that scale? [note: I'm not saying one is or isn't... to be honest, I'm not all that familiar with the sitemaps schema and its features; but I do know it was designed to scale, whereas I don't think Atom was] Cheers, -g
