bob wyman: This new format is neither RSS (in any of its many flavors) nor Atom. Perhaps we should refer to it as LRSS (Less-Rich-Site-Summary)... :-) [cut] While Sitemaps seems, on the whole, to be a very positive thing, I must admit that I'm really sorry that the folk at Google didn't take the time to work with the IETF's Atom Working Group to ensure that Sitemaps were just a stripped-down version of Atom feeds -- or at least compatible with Atom feeds. For instance, a Sitemap record for a page contains just four elements: changefrequency, last-modification-date, location and priority. All of these elements, except for "priority" are defined in Atom entries today... Compatibility between SiteMaps and Atom files would have been an easy thing to have achieved. Then, the blogosphere and the traditional web could have used to the same format for publishing site metadata. The existing degree of almost gratuitous incompatibility is simply not useful.
Randy: Excellent point!
