RE: [xsl] Critique/comments sought: XML/XSLT website documentation project

Subject: RE: [xsl] Critique/comments sought: XML/XSLT website documentation project
From: "Jim Fuller" <jim.fuller@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Thu, 18 Sep 2003 12:07:02 +0100
Possibly you could benefit by reusing existing xml vocabularies, instead of cooking up your own, when it comes to creating websites there has been many approaches from the old Docbook web dtd's to customizing XHTML via modularisation www.w3.org/TR/xhtml-m12n-schema/. In addition, the Apache Cocoon effort has a few standard approaches of building websites with xml/xslt.....though I would say its good to to the complete round trip of xml technologies to get an understanding of the width and breadth of functionality available, nice approach in general.


The construction of the xml schema reflects the low complexity nature of your xml, which is fine...in fact ( whispering ) for data that doesnt require such rigorous validation, which happens all the time in content management situations, I tend to drop the schema definition. In my opinion the benefits are few and far between.

- You could take advantage of moded templates to differentiate between the templates that work with svg and work with html
- I find it useful to use xsl:output in its full form
- make the concept of webpage a one to one mapping, each xml  / xslt should be considered a web page, instead of putting it on a template basis, will make sense later on.
- you could parameterise your xslt, by creating a simple inheritance structure using xsl:import and xsl:include
- its been said that there can never be too much meta data, why not take a look at the RDF/Dublin core to add authoring meta data as well ?

feel free to take a look at my under nourished blog, This link will bring you to a download for an informal website format which just consists of xml/xslt with no schema http://www.ruminate.co.uk/MT/archives/cat_xslt.html

welcome to the world of xslt,

good luck, Jim Fuller



-----Original Message-----
From: Dan Sumption [mailto:dan@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx]
Sent: 18 September 2003 11:36
To: xsl-list@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [xsl] Critique/comments sought: XML/XSLT website documentation
project


I have spent the last week learning XSLT, and have just completed my
first project (in as much as any project is ever "complete"). I wanted
to test my skills for fun, but also try to make something useful, so
I've come up with an XML system for documenting websites. The XSLT then
produces various forms of documentation from the XML, finally ending my
age-old reliance on Visio, Word, Excel etc. documents that always seem
to be out-of-synch with one another.

I'd be grateful if anyone would like to take a look and offer
suggestions/improvements - I know there's a lot that I could add to it,
but at the moment I just wanted to make something that worked. Also, I'm
sure there are people here who will find a tool like this useful. If so,
after some more refinement I'd like to offer it up for wider public
consumption (in which event, I'd welcome tips on where to publicise it)

The XML schema is here:
http://www.pernoctator.com/XML/website.xsd
And a sample XML document based on it here:
http://www.pernoctator.com/XML/whitegoods.xml

Here's an XSLT file to transform the XML into a page of HTML, describing
all of the pages on the website in list format:
http://www.pernoctator.com/XML/sitelisting.xslt
And here's an example of its output:
http://www.pernoctator.com/XML/whitegoods.html

Here's an XSLT file to transform the XML into an SVG map of the website,
showing the links between pages:
http://www.pernoctator.com/XML/sitemap.xslt
And here's an example of its output:
http://www.pernoctator.com/XML/whitegoods.svg
(use an SVG viewer to see the graphical version, e.g.
http://www.adobe.com/svg/viewer/install/main.html)

You can download the whole lot here, including the trig library include
file needed to draw the circles in SVG:
http://www.pernoctator.com/xml.zip

Comments welcome!

Dan Sumption
www.sumption.org 


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