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SiteInfo

"Search is about finding what you are looking for..."


Making your website easier to navigate makes your website more enjoyable to use. Using SiteInfo technology allows you to specify information that will be displayed in a toolbar menu. This allows the A9 toolbar (or other toolbars that want to use SiteInfo) to display a menu about your site, when a user is on your site.

How this works: The information for the menu is provided by a siteinfo.xml file that you, the website owner, put on your site. It contains two things: a description of the menu to be displayed, and information about you and your website.

The technology and protocol is called SiteInfo. This is an open standard. Websites are welcome to use the provided SiteInfo for their site. And as part of an open standard, other toolbars and browsers are welcome to display SiteInfo information as well.

Where We Look For a SiteInfo XML File

The SiteInfo information is an XML file that is found in the siteinfo.xml file at the root of a domain. So, for yourdomain.com we will make a request to http://yourdomain.com/siteinfo.xml. For subdomains we look in the subdomain path, so if you have a 'news' subdomain then it is expected that the file will be http://news.yourdomain.com/siteinfo.xml.

There is no rule on when or under what circumstances a siteinfo.xml file may be accessed, only that the number of accesses should be minimized.

    Note: The A9 Toolbar will only request a siteinfo.xml document for a given domain once in a given browser session. In addition, the request is made through a proxy at A9.com, which will cache the siteinfo.xml document to minimize exess requests to your server.

SiteInfo XML File Format

The siteinfo.xml file is a fairly simple XML file. It consists of top level tags indicating it is site info and a namespace used for versioning. Inside will be one section for WebMenus. A simple siteinfo.xml might look like this:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<siteinfo xmlns="http://a9.com/-/spec/siteinfo/1.0/">
  <webmenu>
    <name>Your Domain</name>
    <menu>
      <item>
        <text>Your Domain Home</text>
        <url>http://yourdomain.com</url>
      </item>
      <item>
        <text>Help</text>
        <url>http://yourdomain.com/help.html</url>
      </item>
    </menu>
  </webmenu>
</siteinfo>

In this instance there are two menu items and no submenus.

The WebMenu Section

The WebMenu format allows for a standard menu, with submenus, to be built. Each menu item is enclosed in a <item> tag and typically contains a <text> tag for the text that appears in the menu, and a <url> tag for the URL that the main browser is navigated to when the menu item is selected. Submenus are defined by putting a <menu> tag inside an existing menu tag and adding menu items as in the previous paragraph. Separators in menus are placed using a <separator/> tag.

One of the really interesting features of WebMenus is the ability to integrate with a toolbar or browser search box. This is done by substituting any sequence of [[:SEARCHTERMS:]] in menu text or menu URL with the contents of the search box. To allow for situations where the URL might be different depending on if there is or is not search box text, two tags are used, <url> and <urlSearch>.

For a complete document on WebMenu formatting and how to create them, see the WebMenu documentation.

Testing a WebMenu

The easiest way of testing the WebMenu in a siteinfo.xml is to install the A9 Toolbar and view the loaded WebMenu that is under the Site Info button.

There is a test mode for this button to assist in developing and debugging the WebMenu. You can specify a setting in the toolbar's registry or config file (depending on whether you are using FireFox or Internet Explorer) and the Site Info button will only download from that URL you specify. This simplifies the task of developing the menus. For more details see the SiteInfo testing page.