When walking in the country, you may look down a lane, and ask yourself, if I walked down there for three of four miles, would I come to a village? You could walk for an hour to find out, or you could follow a line on a map for three or four inches. The point of a map is that very different costs apply to our information processing, due to the great differences between a scale drawing and the reality it represents.
The cost that a site map on a website is intended to avoid is the time spent waiting for a page to download. But the medium is HTML, both for the website, and the map of the website. It is like having a map at 1:1 scale, it will take an hour to follow the line on the map to see where it leads. If you cannot write a navigable website in HTML, how will you write a navigable site map? Will you write a site map guide? And when your HTML skills are not up to the job, will you write a site map guide assistant ... ?
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