Subject: Re: Making all pages consistent
To: Julio Merino <jmmv@hispabsd.org>
From: Jeremy C. Reed <reed@reedmedia.net>
List: netbsd-docs
Date: 07/20/2002 13:20:26
On Tue, 2 Jul 2002, Julio Merino wrote:

> 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

I agree.

> a database server for this generation, but this causes lot of overhead
> in the server.

Yes, PHP and definitely a database server is not needed.

> 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).

Sounds interesting. It may have an un-needed learning curve though.

By the way, your example webpage's source only has a few lines: many, many
html tags on one line for example. It's HTML source is hard to read.

Neveretheless, I also grabbed your original xml source. It is clean and
easy to read.

But I am curious: is it really useful to use new system?

<para> instead of <p> ?
<list> instead of <ul> ?
<item> instead of <li> ?

Why learn (or use) this new idea? (Or is this becoming a standard?)

Either way, I do agree that pages should be consistent and easy (quick) to
maintain without much overhead.

   Jeremy C. Reed
   http://www.reedmedia.net/