User:Broccauley/Universal Sitemap

Back in the 90s almost all web-sites had a site-map page. This was because different websites put their navigation controls in a different locations and it was good to be able to see the entire hierarchy of the website at a glance. This trend is now no longer fashionable, however, the problem that site-maps attempted to solve is just as relevant as ever.

Just under a year ago, a few of us on the Windows 7 Taskforce website were looking at ways to improve the Windows Explorer breadcrumb bar and had some brainstorming ideas on how to implement a universal sitemap. Unfortunately, the administrator of that site deleted all comments from March 2009 towards the end of 2009 :(. I've therefore tried to reproduce what was discussed there here as I think that Mozilla are one of the best parties to implement such an idea (especially since Microsoft have now introduced an excessively overly-minimal interface in IE9 which has somewhat retarded the future possible functionality of the address bar).

Anyway, the idea was simply to add the Vista/7-like breadcrumb bar to a web browser and to allow the breadcrumb bar to be used as a consistent way to navigate any website.

This would be implemented by creating an XML file which is linked to from the HTML document in a similar way to the way CSS files are linked. The XML sitemap could also be created in-line in a similar way to which CSS styles can also be defined directly within the HTML file.

Broccauley 03:15, 16 September 2010 (PDT)