1. Sitemaps IT4102 Presentation
Pádraig James O Donovan

2. What is a sitemap?
XML file which lists all URLs on web page with associated metadata
Grants better efficiency to web crawlers
Sitemap 0.90 is offered under the terms of the Attribution-ShareAlike Creative Commons License and has wide adoption, including support from Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft

3. Sitemap format and protocol
Must be encoded in UTF-8
Tag requisites
Begin with an opening <urlset> tag and end with a closing </urlset> tag
Specify the namespace (protocol standard) within the <urlset> tag
Include a <url> entry for each URL, as a parent XML tag
Include a <loc> child entry for each <url> parent tag
All other tags are optional
<lastmod>
<changefreq>
<priority>

7. Entity escaping Ampersand & & Greater Than > >
Less Than < <
Quotation ” "
Apostrophe ‘ &apos;

9. File compression Sitemap files have limitations
50,000 URLs
50MB max
If desired, you may compress sitemap files using gzip to reduce the bandwidth requirements
Far reaching advantages

10. Disadvantages
XML syntax is verbose, especially for human readers, relative to other alternative ‘text-based’ data transmission formats.
XML namespaces are problematic to use and namespace support can be difficult to correctly implement in an XML parser.
The distinction between content and attributes in XML seems unnatural to some and makes designing XML data structures harder.

11. Bibliography
Sitemaps.org
Escapecodes.org
Techopedia.com

12. Thank you for listening!