is Google recommending linking to an HTML site map on specific pages?

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

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  Christopher Fischbach: Yep.
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  Sampsa Daavitsainen: I’d say Google wants web designers to finally understand topical context. Call it Pillar Content, Cornerstone Content or just Categories. Many would say that they have good category structure but in too many cases it’s all wrong. Too many categories or url with categories stripped. A web page should be a pyramid with well thought internal linking. I’d say the ‘navigational page’ should be about categories. Not a technical sitemap.
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  Alan Bleiweiss: Archaic recommendation, and unhelpful for any site with more than a dozen pages. Anything more than that and it`s a "nothing but links" page in Google`s view. The concept started before proper navigation with section level sub menus became a standard and before sitemap XML.
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  Kim Krause Berg: What Alan Bleiweiss said. Sitemaps were popular 17 years ago. Todays design and SEO are tied to a well planned information architecture with navigation that follows along for findability, wayfinding, conversions, sense of place and communicating context.
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  Michael Martinez: I use HTML site maps on all my large sites. I break them up in meaningful ways to make them user friendly. There is no other way to convey to visitors the kind of content they can expect to find. But you have to be reasonable. You link to sections and not every page if you have tens of thousands or more pages. You can create section specific HTML site maps. And you do not have to be thorough. First rule of HTML sitemaps is "be useful".