What is the difference between HTML sitemaps and XML sitemaps?


What is the difference between HTML sitemaps and XML sitemaps?

HTML sitemaps appear as a webpage, and are human readable.  XML sitemaps are machine readable, making a website more accessible to web robots, such as Googlebot (see also Robots exclusion standard).  For visuals, check out my quick and dirty webpage:

I did some work trying to bridge sitemaps with mindmaps, only to discover that they are not really compatible.  Websites contain recursive linkages; whereas, mindmaps are strictly hierarchical.  For details, see: