Subject: Making all pages consistent
To: None <netbsd-docs@netbsd.org>
From: Julio Merino <jmmv@hispabsd.org>
List: netbsd-docs
Date: 07/02/2002 22:58:11
Hello

I proposed sometime ago a change of the pages so they were generated
to look the same. For example, have the footer on all of them equal,
or use the same font styles for titles and the like. Or, another
example, to make it easier to maintain news. I proposed using PHP and
a database server for this generation, but this causes lot of overhead
in the server.

I've been playing lastly with XML+XSLT. As I see now this could be the
way to go. You write a XSLT stylesheet which converts a .xml file into
a simple .html (4.01 standard, xhtml, as you want).

The source code gets highly clean and easy to maintain, and the
resulting pages are as light as the ones we currently have (that is,
plain html). Also, the source code can use our own dtd or simply be
xhtml code which has some special tags processed by the xslt.

As an example, I converted the HispaBSD site from PHP+PostgreSQl to use
XML+XSLT, and the result is quite good. You can see this here:

    http://www.hispabsd.org

In the "Repositorio CVS" you can download a snapshot of the CVS so you
can look at the XSL stylesheet and the tags I defined in all of the .xml
files.

What do you think? The change would be (very?) hard to be done, but it
would be nice ;) Oppinions? Comments?

Thanks!

-- 
HispaBSD admin - http://www.hispabsd.org
Julio Merino <jmmv@hispabsd.org>