Questions and Answers

The Difference between an XML Sitemap and a HTML Sitemap is that XML sitemaps are created for search engines to discover spiders, crawlers and bots effiently which the majority of crawlers are designed are used to harm resources and other content on a website. An Html sitemaps is a user-friendly website with clickable list of webpages.

Benefits of XML Sitemaps:

• XML Sitemaps improves crawlability and indexation. It helps search engines to identify crawlers. It is more useful for websites with different variaties of pages that are not accesible through navigation menu.
• XML Sitemaps provides additional Information about webpages. It allows any additional information that has been added to or modified to a page in a website. it also help search engines to determine how often crawler be on the page content.
• XML sitemaps are easier for search engines to discover new pages. As any additional webpages that has been created XML sitemaps help discovers any new additional pages on the website.

Disadvatages of XML Sitemaps:

• XML sitemaps can be complex and time consuming to create and maintain, a new and old pages, with the addition of it having requirements such as syntax and formating.
• XML sitemaps can reveal sensative or confidential information which can be a security risk for any user using the web page.
• XML sitemaps can cause content issues this can include multiple version on the same URL domain. With having the same URL domain names it will confuse the search engine when accessing the website or the webpage.

Benefits of HTML Sitemaps:

• HTML sitemaps help organise large websites. As a website grows it will have many webpages allocated for different topics and use, HTML sitemaps help make it easier to navigate through different webpages on a larger website.
• HTML sitemaps increases the visibility of a website on a search engine. Meaning its more compatible and capable of displaying the website onto any search engine regardless on which browser the user is using.
• HTML sitemaps serve as a project manager and architecture type to develop a website. it helps developers and programmers to use as a tool to oversee the structure and creation of a website with its webpages.

Disadvantages or limitations of HTML Sitemaps:

• HTML sitemaps can't navigate any additional new webpages on a website if it's not linked to it meaning a search engine will have a few webpages or sections missing and inaccesable to see.
• While HTML sitemaps are helpful for large websites it's not recommend for smaller websites. It's not ideal for a small website since HTML sitemaps primal use is for websites with larger content and not for websites with a few pages and doesn't have any additional materials.

IDE or Integrated development environments is a software application type that helps programmers to develop software codes to be used in creating program languages. There is different type of software applications to use for developing HTML sitemaps for websites and webpages. There are different software applications to choose. There are three examples that could be used to start development for beginners such as an entry level trainee code developer Visual Studio, Netbeans, and Komodo Edit.

Visual Studio includes compliers, code completion tools, source control, extentions and other features to enhance the overall experience of the software development, it also allow users to have multiple tabs and different programing project to be sourced and opened at the same time. The negative side of using Visual Studio is it can be slow when running on older devices since its resource intensive and a bit intimidating to use for other programmers because of its complete integrated development enviroment. However a benefit for Visual Studio is it has two options, a free general public license with a few features taken away and a subscription base model which include all the features. Entry level trainee code developers can utilise Visual Studio since it has a free version with most of it features included for professional support with a few features missing.

Netbeans is commonly used for java script developments. The positive side of Netbeans is the ease of use. It is highly known for a user-friendly interface with ease of use towards programmers and developers making it an excelent choice for an entry level trainee code developer and the application is free to download since its open source. Beside the user-friendly interface a negative aspect of Netabean is sometimes it crashes when being used for a period of time. When working on projects Netabean can consume a lot of memory usage and it has a limited features, because by default it doesn’t come with any professional support.

Komodo Edit allows its users to use multiple tabs with different coding languages on different tabs making it great for multitasking, and each tabs has its own bookmarked and when reopened it will go back to the last module that the programmer has stoped before hand. While Komodo Edit is free because of it general public lincesing the negative side is that it has a confusing user interface which could be overwhelming for new users. It would be a challenge of entry level code developers but for its use, it can be a great application improve programming and development.

In 1989, Tim Berners-Lee invented the first information system or the internet which he coined the title “World Wide Web” (www) and the first to program a browser and an editor in 1990. Tim Berners-Lee wrote the very first version of the “Hypertext Markup Language” or known as HTML, the formatting language became the primary publishing format for the web. In 1994, Tim Berners-Lee founded the World Wide Web Consortium or the W3C at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology or MIT with the colaboration of four partnered admisnistratives. Inria Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et Automatique, Keio University of Japan, ERCIM or European Research Consortium in Informatics and Mathematics, and Beihang University as the fourth partnered administratives for W3C management. Today there are a lot of web browsers such as Google Chrome, Firefox, Microsoft Edge, and Safari to name a few. Issues encountred by web developers consist with security, maintainace, external integrations, platform compatibility, user interface design, performance, tech stack which includes the programming languages, servers, IDEs, cloud based services, budget or fianance and the others.

There are different values for web standards. W3C list the follow:

• Follow a consensus-based decision process.
• Cater for accessibility, privacy, security, and internationalization.
• Reflect the views of diverse industries and global stakeholders.
• Balance speed, fairness, public accountability, and quality.
• Benefit from Royalty-Free patent licensing commitments from participants.
• Stable (and W3C ensures their persistence at the published URI).
• Benefit from wide review from groups inside and outside W3C.
• Available at no cost.
• Strenghened through interoperability testing.

Website testing methodologies are testing end-user scenarios on a website to see its behavior and functionability on different web browsers and devices. Some common testing methologies that can be used to test the websites functionality are:

• Manual testing by having people track if the website is up and running smoothly.
• Automated testing by having computers run diagnostics and test if there is any problems on the website through different devices such as desktops, laptops, smart phones and others.
• Performance on different devices to see if the issue is purely through software programming or hardware incapabilities.
• Compatibility on different web browers.
• Accesibility on any device with a search engine or web browers.

By using this methods it will help determine the functionality of the website across different web broswer platform.

The Northern Territory (NT) Government has a endorsed requirements of accessibility for all their webpage contents. The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) is the required standard guidelines that the NT government is implementing on their webpages. It covers a wide range of recommendations for making web content accessible for user. Following the given guidelines will improve the accessibility of the contents towards users with disabilities such as blindness, hearing loss and other recognised disabilities.

Some of the required Key features include:

• Text-Alternatives to make it easier for users with low vision to see text.
• Time-Based media with Audio Descriptions, Sign Language, Captions and alternative takes to help users with blindness or loss of hearing.
• Keyboard Accesibilible to provide easy controls for users with personal computers.
• Ease of Navigation. Like Page Titles, link Purpose (In context), Headings and labels, Sections Headings and Focus Visibility.

The best way to organise any assets used for a specific webpage is to have a dedicated folders to insert all of the html files with an additional folder for css files and images. It is essential to maintain an efficient way to store assets locally on a computer and within a root folder of the website.

Locally organised on a computer should consist the following:

• A Project folder. It is utilised as the main folder where all the html files are stored along with the subfolders.
• Subfolder for extra assest. It consist with different files in the project folder. The subfolder should consist with separate folders for css files and images used for the project.
• Specific names used for the programming pathways to ensure it can find the proper folder and file to be used for the program.

Organising Within a websites root folder consist the following:

• The same structure as used for the project to avoid any errors on finding the correct pathways for specific folders and files. It maintains the original source code of the program to properly function.
• Compression of asset. Before uploading to a server consider compressing the entire project inlcuding every assets from script files, css files, images and others to reduce the file size when uploading.
• Check the structure. Check if all the links in the HTML file is functional if any assests are in different areas it could disrupt the flow between the structure of the HTML’s function and content down to it's basic style and design.
• Having Robots.txt and .htaccess.By considering robots.txt file it helps control the search engine indexing of different assest on a webpage. Htaccess files are for server configurations and optimisation for caching and redirectorion rules.