Why not build third part Sitemaps Protocol?

Sitemaps Protocol,search engine,

[hammer_shi]

It's know to all of us that Sitemaps Protocol like Google's does good to both sides,
including webmaster and search engine.But I think there are some questions in Google Sitemaps Protocol.
First , The protocol is a Google protocol ,not a commom .Perhaps there would be another Yahoo Sitemaps Protocol and MSN Sitemaps Protocol,at that time,it's very difficult to maintain for webmaster,do you think so?
Next , Google Sitemaps Protocol has some problems,the XML file must be encode in UTF-8,but most of us always use GB2312,GBK,ISO-8859-1 and so on.Using UTF-8 in xml,Chinese can't display correctly , so do other Asian languages ,I think.
The last but not the least,there would be another spam! Search Engine rank the web page depends on the web page's modify frequency in some degree.So some webmasters would cheat Search Engine ,they would write a wrong Sitemaps file, at last ,Sitemaps Protocol could not work well.

From the forum , I found most webmasters use a program to create and update their Sitemaps files.
How about develop a common protocol-based program(Sitemaps Creator),it can work in any condition, and the Sitemaps files encrypt in some way,the webmasters could not edit them themsevles.oh ,In order to do that,Sitemaps Creator should be called by Search Engine,Search Engine send a self key parameter and the Sitemaps Creator update the Sitemaps files,then Search Engine use their key to access the Sitemaps files.
ah,perhaps there be another question ,more than two Search Engine visited the Sitemaps Creator in the same time.

It is important for us to build a common Sitemaps protocol immediatly,before another search engine Sitemaps protocol come into true.

[Virtualpixels]

How about creating seXML (Search Engine Extensible Markup Language)?

So far I'm having to maintain the following search engine files on my web server:

Google's Site Map File
Alexa's Info File
Grub Info File
Robot.txt File

How many more files will we (webmaster) have to maintain to get indexed in the search engines?

[edited by: stuntdubl at 2:52 pm (utc) on July 4, 2005]
[edit reason] no sigs please per TOS [webmasterworld.com] [/edit]

[andye]

Google have made a change on Sitemaps:

8. What other formats can I use for my sitemaps?

While we prefer that you use the Google Sitemap format so that you can take advantage of the features we built in specifically for communication with search engines, you can submit files in several other formats. The simplest of these is a text file that contains a list of URLs.

OAI-PMH (Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting)—This is an application-independent interoperability framework based on metadata harvesting. Generally, you would use this format only if you already have a site that uses this protocol.

Syndication feed—Google accepts RSS (Real Simple Syndication) 2.0 and Atom 0.3 feeds. Generally, you would use this format only if your site already has a syndication feed. Note that this method may not let Google know about all the URLs in your site, since the feed may only provide information on recent URLs.

Text file—You can provide Google with a simple text file that contains one URL per line. However, Google recommends that once you have a text sitemap file for your site, you use the Sitemap Generator to create a Sitemap from this text file using the Sitemap protocol. You can then edit this file to provide additional information about your URLs such as when they were last modified and how often they change.

best, a.

[niki_man]

text file—You can provide Google with a simple text file that contains one URL per line. However, Google recommends that once you have a text sitemap file for your site, you use the sitemap Generator to create a sitemap from this text file using the sitemap protocol. You can then edit this file to provide additional information about your URLs such as when they were last modified and how often they change.

Google is a little vague about the text file...

[Psazf]

Can anyone explain me what is a "Google's Site Map File"?
Thanks and kind regards
PSAZF