Re: Defining website scope using Sitemap protocol

Hi Kathy, 

My assumption is that a site map generation tool will generally map the entire site if told to do so.   I agree that the generated site map output can then be trimmed (if desired) for submission to a search engine - but I'm not suggesting that we should work directly from this submission.

What I am suggesting is that whatever content the website owner wishes to get assessed (for which THEY have chosen to make a conformance claim) should be defined / scoped by them using the sitemap protocol (as it is a common widely used standard) and then presented for evaluation. 

I would not recommend working from different CMS systems, as some do things others cannot.  Also, third party evaluators may not be allowed direct access to a CMS. 

I also don't know if we should be interested in templates - I would be if I was going to make suggestions on how to fix issues - but, aren't we only interested in whether whole pages opened by the end user (scoped in a conformance claim) conform or not.

Interested to hear thoughts / comments.

Very best regards 

Alistair Garrison

On 27 Nov 2011, at 16:29, Kathy Wahlbin wrote:

> Hi Alistair –
>  
> I think that is a good place to get started and to see the pages on the site but we need to keep in mind that these are only for the areas that webmasters want search engines to crawl.  There may be areas of the site that need to be reviewed that were excluded from this sitemap.xml file.
>  
> Another way to get an idea of scope is to use the functions in the content management system (CMS) to see all the pages on the site.  Within the CMS, the number of templates and common components could also be identified which could help defined scope.
>  
> Regards,
>  
> Kathy
>  
> Phone:  978.443.0798
> Cell:  978.760.0682
> Fax:  978.560.1251
> KathyW@ia11y.com
>  
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> From: Alistair Garrison [mailto:alistair.j.garrison@gmail.com] 
> Sent: Saturday, November 26, 2011 8:06 AM
> To: Eval TF
> Subject: Defining website scope using Sitemap protocol
>  
> Dear all, 
>  
> It seems that a good number of website owners / webmasters submit a sitemap to search engines.  The schema of choice for this sitemap (file) is apparently the Sitemap protocol - http://www.sitemaps.org/ (supported by Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft.)
>  
> What would your thoughts be on using this sitemap file generated for a website, by the website owners / webmaster, to define the scope of a website? Possibly answering the question - How can an evaluator express the scope of a website.
>  
> Would be interested to hear thoughts / comments.
>  
> All the best 
>  
> Alistair 
>  
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