> > While I think I tend to agree that a REST description language isn't > > really needed, I was wondering if there could already be a standard > > existing in terms of sitemap navigation pages. > > This reminded me of the Google Sitemap Protocol: > > https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/docs/en/protocol.html > > The purpose of this format was to instruct Google Bot where > the resources on your site are and how frequently each of > them changes.
Yup, that's a good point, and part of the reason why I was raising this question: I haven't yet seen anything else that really covers this space in as much detail. >From a Microformats perspective, human readability is a significant aspect that is missing from the XML sitemaps. One of the purposes of any map is to simplify and clarify the view of relationships within a space. A successful sitemap should be able to communicate the overall "shape" of a site at a glance, as well as providing granular links to resources that are both human and machine usable. In some contexts, I definitely see sitemaps as being able to take the place of service descriptions. But in other contexts, the service description is more about URI construction than actually providing a map to a set of resources. eg: http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2005/04/06/restful.html > In general the RESTy way is just to follow links from resource > to resource. A sitemap is nice but it is not the strength of > the Web. > "hypertext as the engine of application state" The sitemap is a resource itself - it just happens to be a very common architectural idiom for websites at the visual/navigation level, perhaps less so at the semantic level? Just to reiterate, in a more broad sense - I'm interested in finding out more about standards and approaches that present sitemaps, site navigation and/or service descriptions in a human readable / communicable way. Any of these approaches would no doubt be based on hyperlinks, its more a question of what surrounds the hyperlinks... Regards, Mark _______________________________________________ microformats-rest mailing list [email protected] http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-rest
