Re: draft tip: add a site map

On Mon, Apr 02, 2007 at 01:56:45PM +0000, Michael Lavocah wrote:

> Typically, you might use a server side include (.ssi) to include
> your menu bar into each page. Your webpage would then have to be a
> server parsed html file (.shtml) rather than a normal .html file.

This isn't true. Servers can be configured to handle SSI without
requiring a .shtml file extension.

Perhaps there is scope for another couple of tips here. "There are no
file extensions on the WWW / (Programming) Language nutural URIs" and
"Including common content in multiple pages."

I certainly think that explaining how to use SSI / PHP for includes is
too genericly useful to hide away inside a tip about writing site
maps.

> A site map is a list of all the links on a site

It might be a list of all the pages in a site, but generally wouldn't
include (for example) every page of search results ever generated by a
site's search engine. On large sites, it simply isn't feasible to even
include every static page in a single page sitemap.

> but we already have one in our navigation bar.

If the site is very small, then possibly. With larger sites this
probably means that too much content is being stuffed in the main
navigation. With very large sites, this is a real no-no - imagine if
Sophos put a link to every page on their site in their nav bar (IIRC
they have something in the order of 100,000 pages, so it would add
(assuming a very conservative estimate about the URL and text length)
3 megabytes to every page)!

-- 
David Dorward                                      http://dorward.me.uk

Received on Tuesday, 3 April 2007 09:00:32 UTC