Re: Encoding of site structure ...

It seems like this discussion (from late
february/early march this year) somehow died out...

 --- veith.risak@chello.at skrev: > 
> I aggree with the wish to have some common encoding
> of site structures. This makes sense, because many
> sites have the same look and feel, they show the
> same "corporate indentity".
> 
> But there is a second - more theoretical - issue to
> be seen:
> 
> You can see the web as nodes which are more or less
> connected by links. This is the normal view.
> 
> But you can see the web also as "clusters" which are
> linked. (Links to single pages still exist) You
> could see these clusters as some sort of
> "super-nodes" amd you can concentrate all incoming
> links to these super-nodes. Than the structure looks
> much simpler.
> Perhaps it is possible to find out some levels above
> these super-nodes. Than a hierarchy of clusters
> could be the result.
> 
> Clusters are defined by being internally much more
> connected than to the outside. To find clusters from
> a matrix of nodes/links is very hard (mathematicians
> said to me NP-hard) expecially for very large
> hypertexts like the web.
> 
> It would therefore helpful to define "sites" in some
> formal way. They mostly do form cluster-structures.

This is exactly what I want too. There have been
suggestions of using RSS for doing this, but does RSS
actually define a site? And can it be used as a
replacement for placing site content and navigation
inside the content of each page (ie, the pages will
contain only their own content)? This requires that
some specification/recommendation that user agents
conform to (I thought XHTML would be the right place
to define this, but I'm not sure) specify how they are
supposed to do this. If the site definitions are
written in a way so that UAs doesn't have to read them
and show at least the navigation (and preferably also
other site-wide content, such as headers), then we
still have to mess up the pages with including this in
them all to make sure they are accessible to all.

Some other interesting issues of using a language
actually defining a site, instead of RSS, would be to
define how to display navigation and other sitewide
content (which pages should be included in the
navigation (for example, "all top level pages, all
pages on the same level as the current page and the
level below it, and the path from top level down to
current page"), how should the navigation be displayed
(using CSS, maybe?), and much more), and to link to
stylesheets in the site definition, so that these
would be inherited and optionally overridden by the
individual pages.

Any thoughts of how such a "site definition" language
might be?


______________________________________________________
Få den nye Yahoo! Messenger på http://no.messenger.yahoo.com/
Nye ikoner og bakgrunner, webkamera med superkvalitet og dobbelt så morsom

Received on Saturday, 8 March 2003 06:50:50 UTC