Standard-Navigation
Easily Through the Web

Basics

The basic concept is the nesting of tags to indicate subordination of pages. If your website has a home page, plus two (subordinate) pages, the outline of your sitemap would be something like this:

<item name="Home Page" ... >
  <item name="Page 1" ... />
  <item name="Page 2" ... />
</item>

The "role" Concept

This is certainly one of the coolest features introduced by Standard-Navigation. The idea is to keep important links in the very same place, making them easier for the user to spot. These role’s are defined:

• contact
• contentinfo: Central repository for all "background" information about the site, especially legal information like imprint, terms and conditions, privacy policy, etc.)
• search: If the user clicks on this icon, the search page (i.e. the page containing the search form) is loaded. If you add at least one of the following three attributes, a text field will pop up instead, allowing the user to type in their search phrase under the magnifying glass right away:
  • method. Allowed values: get (=default), post
  • variable: The name of the variable to be handed over to your search script. Allowed values: any string. Default: q
  • constant: Any additional information you want to be handed over to your search script. Allowed values: any string.
  Example: If you declare this in your sitemap:
  <item role="search" url="search.php" variable="searchfor" constant="&boolean=AND" />
  and the user enters "africa", the following URL is opened:
  http://www.yourBaseURL.com/
  search.php?searchfor=africa&boolean=AND

Each of these role’s may appear several times in the sitemap (e.g. if the site has multiple contact pages). In this case a sub-menu pops up (containing the name-attributes of the <item>’s) when the user clicks. We indicate this by showing the usual triangle symbol under the icon.

Tags

Attributes

Special Charaters / Entity Escaping

XML requires the following special characters to be escaped:

URLs containing an & need to be escaped, see the FAQ entry.

Schema

Download the Schema

DTD

Download the DTD

Further Reglementations (not included in the DTD)

• These attributes are mandatory for each <item> or its <variant>’s. They can, however, be given with a superordinate element:
  lang
  type
• If "url" is not given in <item>, it must contain subordinate <item>’s or <variant>’s and be declared there.
• If "name" is not given in <item>, it must contain subordinate <item>’s and be declared in each of them.
• <variant> cannot stand alone, there must at least be one more.
• All <variant>’s of the same <item> must differ in either "lang" or "type".
• All <variant>’s of the same <group> must differ in "name".
• All <variant>’s of <image> must differ in either "width" or "height".
• <variant> may only have "width" and "height" if it is a child element of <image>.
• An <item> must not have more than one "role". (If several role’s are located on the same page, they have to be declared as anchors and entered separately into the sitemap.)
• The "method" attribute is only allowed for an <item> with role="search".