sitemaps.org, siteData-36, standardizedFieldValues-51

Yahoo, Google, and Microsoft released a sitemap protocol recently.
 http://www.sitemaps.org/terms.html

It's clearly a contribution to our siteData-36 issue
http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/issues.html#siteData-36


But they seem to be squatting in HTTP space, a la favicon.ico:

[[
It is strongly recommended that you place your Sitemap at the root
directory of your web server. For example, if your web server is at
example.com, then your Sitemap index file would be at
http://example.com/sitemap.xml.
]]
 -- http://www.sitemaps.org/protocol.html
    2006-11-20 14:53:23

... which brings up standardizedFieldValues-51
http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/issues.html#standardizedFieldValues-51

But later in the document, it says:

[[
Once you have created the Sitemap file and placed it on your webserver,
you need to inform the search engines that support this protocol of its
location by submitting it to them via the search engine's submission
interface or an HTTP request.
]]

If they use submitted URIs to find sitemaps, then the choice of the
final path segment shouldn't matter. Does anybody know if URIs
like http://example/i-will-call-it-what-I-like-thank-you.xml work?

Are people seeing "GET /sitemap.xml" in their logs even though
there are no links to that address?

If somebody was already using http://example/sitemap.xml for some
other purpose, the risk of misinterpretation seems low, since 
the sitemap format does have a namespace URI.
Though it's a little hard to confirm; I get a 404 at
  http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9

The word "feedback" doesn't occur in their FAQ, nor "review".

Sigh... does anyone else remember a time when people and companies
who wanted to deploy new technology on the Internet were expected
to submit their proposal for community review before deploying widely?

-- 
Dan Connolly, W3C http://www.w3.org/People/Connolly/
D3C2 887B 0F92 6005 C541  0875 0F91 96DE 6E52 C29E

Received on Tuesday, 21 November 2006 14:55:23 UTC