The sitemap is generated into the html variant of the htm sitefile. Therefore (a) your sitefile is named "site.htm" containing the layout decoration with an empty body block. The sitefile is the ~head~ of all other html pages. (b) the sitemap file is named "site.html" and it takes "site.htm" as the ~head~ and the ~body~ part is generated on the fly. It contains the list of files being generated by mksite.sh with some meta information attached.
A sitemap file is a good thing for your users to quickly find a very specific page they wish - it does list the pages not only by their shorthand name on the navigation bar but it also shows the long title as it was given to them in their htm source file.
A sitemap file is also good thing for the developer as it shows the long title as it will turn up at google. Most webspiders treat information in the title line and first header line as being of more importance than the rest of the text. They use it for classification of your documents.
In the tabbed examples I am putting the sitemap href as a section href on the navigation bar and also the upper left "current page" name is made hot to link to the sitemap. Even the page you are now looking at has a those two links to the sitemap file.
I am currently experimenting with two different sitemap layouts but the simple one seems to be still the best - showing the section/subsection relations, the last change date, and the long title of the page.
- | common title prefix - sitemap | - |
* | project | 2004-04-18 | Website Look And Feel Generator | ||
- | summary | 2004-04-18 | What is MKSITE.SH | ||
- | reasoning | 2004-04-18 | Why does MKSITE.SH exist | ||
- | usage | 2004-04-18 | How to use MKSITE.SH | ||
* | technical | 2004-04-18 | Developer Information | ||
- | example | 2004-04-18 | ...and it works | ||
- | two passes | 2004-04-18 | using two passes | ||
- | tiny bits | 2004-04-18 | MKSITE is small | ||
* | examples | 2004-04-18 | Examples of sitefiles | ||
- | horizontal | 2004-04-18 | Horizontal Navigation Bar | ||
- | vertical | 2004-04-18 | Vertical Navigation Bar | ||
- | tabbed | 2004-04-18 | Tabbed Vertical Navigation Bar | ||
- | multi section | 2004-04-18 | Multi Section Vertical Navigation Bar | ||
* | links | 2004-04-18 | Some Links And References | ||
- | some hints | 2004-04-18 | Some Additional Hints | ||
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