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[XSL-LIST Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: Site structured on XSLT.
 At 03:58 PM 7/8/2003, you wrote: As I've been addressing this issue tangencially, and I understand a little bit where I want to be in my next step, I would like to know if somebody can help me on this task: I would like to create a site entirely using XSLT. That's cool. My initial approach was, as I said efore, an HTML with frames, which loads a DOM, This is fine -- but going down this road, you are in advance (considerably in advance!) of where web standards have specified behaviors on clients. There are simply no vendor-neutral specifications for loading an HTML document with a DOM, invoking an XSLT process (with or without parameters), and "fill[ing] the HTML fields". It can certainly be done in a platform-dependent way: there are web browsers sufficiently advanced that you can achieve this kind of processing in the client. But the technology deployed simply won't work in another browser. "Must use IE8 to view" is a poor way to publish your stuff to the world. It's this current status quo, combined with the large number of web users who don't have even the latest browsers, that leads many developers not to push too far ahead of this bleeding edge, but instead achieve the stated goal through other means. And in fact, you'll find that web sites "created entirely using XSLT" are more and more common -- but using a server-side process, or batch process, as we have described earlier in this thread -- rather than relying on the browser to do the XSLT processing. This is the actual structure contains issues like Data Islands, Java Script, and others, and it stands like this: This won't allow that. The script that loads the DOM and stylesheet won't be XSLT, and will be browser-dependent. b) Able to access dynamically an XML structure in a separate directory where data file is kept. On the client? Or over the network, using http? If the former, you're going to have hard problems with security issues. If the latter, it can be done, but this is another reason why processing the entire thing on the server might be preferable (then the file is just there). c) Implement a good and simple approach that splits data, from presentation, from data access. Can be done even running server-side or in batch mode; it's just an aspect of good design. d) Remove the data islands. Don't like them anyway. Design pure XML, then convert to pure HTML. No hybrid formats. Can be done on the server, in a batch, whatever. e) Reduce the usage of any javascript or any other external function to the minimum possible. This sounds like you want a server-side solution. You're simply not going to achieve processing on the client without some kind of "glue" language to control it. Take a look at LMNL.org. It's a plain vanilla HTML web site, uses frames and CSS. It's entirely generated from XML source using XSLT -- no Javascript, no data islands. The transformation happens at home on a laptop, on the odd weekend when there's been a change to the documents. Then the changed files get uploaded to a very old-fashioned server, and voila. (Why generate from XML source? because it's easier to author, validate, quality-check and maintain, for one; it makes it trivial to change the site's look-and-feel anytime, for another, etc. etc.) Others can point you to sites that are similarly generated dynamically from XML on a server, in response to specific requests for pages. I hope this helps, Wendell ====================================================================== Wendell Piez mailto:wapiez@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Mulberry Technologies, Inc. http://www.mulberrytech.com 17 West Jefferson Street Direct Phone: 301/315-9635 Suite 207 Phone: 301/315-9631 Rockville, MD 20850 Fax: 301/315-8285 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Mulberry Technologies: A Consultancy Specializing in SGML and XML ====================================================================== XSL-List info and archive: http://www.mulberrytech.com/xsl/xsl-list 
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