[Gllug] Website developement

[Tom Gilbert]

* Dean S Wilson (dean.wilson3 at virgin.net) wrote:
> From: "Bruce Richardson" <brichardson at lineone.net>
> 
> >> I used to do this, and the best tool I found was WML (website meta
> 
> >> <newsitem>
> >> blah blah
> >> </newsitem>
> >> Then run make; make install to upload :) It was pretty okay.
> 
> >Do I hear in the distance (from somewhere near Brick Lane), a voice
> >shouting "XML!"?
> 
> Maybe. :)
> 
> XML is a Good Thing for a lot of this kind of stuff (IMHO), I'd be a
> bit dubious about learning another markup system like WML (Which I
> have to plead ignorance of having never used it.) since it's not (If
> it does what I think it does) really reusable in other areas. XML is
> becoming widely accepted and has a nice selection of pre-written tools
> for its use (Although I doubt Tom would have issues writing his own
> tools, I'm a bit lazier than that ;)) and can be put into a nice
> integrated solution to take a lot of the pain away from managing a
> website.

I couldn't agree more. I just took a site I wrote in WML about 6 months
ago, and converted it to run from cocoon (an XSLT engine, among other
things) and it took me, ooh, 5 minutes? :) That takes you from
dynamically generated, static content, to server side, dynamic content -
and guess what - you didn't have to change your pages.

WML let me use xml to structure my site, and put the actual
implementation elsewhere, nicely seperated.

Compare my old site:
<screenshot date="20000506" caption="foo">Here's a screenshot</screenshot>

With the kind of "template tools" some of my mates have used:
@@screenshot@@20000506
Here's a screenshot
@@end

(*shudder). At least the WML solution scales up to a proper xml engine
with no modifications in content (you obviously have to change the way
you define what the tags are translated into).

Anyway, I'm not saying do one thing or the other - if it's just an incy
wincy website, it just plain doesn't matter at the end of the day, hell,
use cpp and #include statements for all the difference it will make =D

But if you want it to grow, and to last - think ahead a little and see
where you'll go.

Tom.
-- 
   .^.    .-------------------------------------------------------.
   /V\    | Tom Gilbert, London, England | http://linuxbrit.co.uk |
 /(   )\  | Open Source/UNIX consultant  | tom at linuxbrit.co.uk    |
  ^^-^^   `-------------------------------------------------------'

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