It's not everyday that you see the big search engines agree on something. However SearchEngineWatch reports that
Google, Yahoo and Microsoft have all declared their backing for a standardised sitemaps protocol.
With the three main search engines behind this initiative it will be in the best interests of webmasters everywhere to take a close look at this development. This information will be presented at sitemaps.org and was originally based on a Google idea.
As of yet, Ask have not been involved at this stage, although the invitation is open all search engines due to the protocol being released under a Creative Commons license. At the moment you can submit your sitemaps through both Google's webmaster tools and Yahoo's site explorer.
For those who are wondering if their are any tools to help in creating their own sitemaps, Google have provided a python based sitemap generator. If you don't like that tool, I'm sure you can find many others through the search engines like this or this.
http://www.scribes-write.co.uk/article/20061116103632672.html