More XML Goodness from Google and Microsoft

Google Sitemaps is an experimental way for site owners to submit XML-based lists of pages, indicating what to index and roughly how often. I suppose it’s intended to both make spidering more efficient and help Google respond to the fast, on-demand indexing offered by blog search engines such as Technorati.

Playing around with the priority tag might prove useful, and there’s bound to be a slight advantage for those submitting sitemaps. If you develop content management systems or blogging software start looking at adding support now to get a head start.

Microsoft Office Open XML Formats will be introduced in Office 12, along with updates for Office 2000/XP/2003, and will be available under a royalty-free license (hopefully with few strings attached). This could be a huge change in Microsoft’s strategy, probably forced by growing pressure from rival formats and customers’ (particularly governments’) anxiety about storing content in closely-guarded proprietary formats.

Again, if you work on content management systems then keep a close eye on this, it might allow you to do things that were previously too tricky and early support for the new format could be an advantage.

Sat 4th Jun 2005, 4:23pm GMT

Filed under: Search Engines, Server-side Coding, Software, Web

---

Comments

Comments are now closed for this entry.