We have not elaborated this possibility yet to maintain a single XML document for a whole web site. It would be very similar to the publishing process of this book. The authors use one XML document that is the starting point for the automatic generation of the HTML 4.01 and XHTML Basic files for the web server.
It might be feasible for a web site containing hundreds of web pages like for this book. XSLT style sheets can be used to automatically transform the XML document into separate web pages. The XSLT style sheets generate all files comprising the whole HTML or XHTML source code.
Norman Walsh uses this technique to maintain his web site at http://nwalsh.com/. His "Website DTD" is a customization of the "DocBook XML V4.1.2 DTD", that the authors of this book use for the book authoring. He also provides the "Website XSL Stylesheet", that customises the "XSL DocBook Stylesheets".
The advantage of this concept is, that the separate files do not need a manual redesign if the layout shall be changed. The whole layout redesign is handled by the change of the central XSLT style sheets. If you have developed XSLT functions to create the header, footer and navigation bar, then you only need to adapt these functions at a central place.
The disadvantages are:
You need an XML text processor to maintain the XML document. We have found only one XML capable text processor: Corel WordPerfect.
XSLT is a programming language. You need to be able to code software like with any other programming language.
The automatic XSLT transformation generates always all files, even if their content has not been revised. In order to avoid the upload of the whole set of files onto to the web server, you need to compare the content of the old files with the new files. Nevertheless, simple Perl scripts should solve it.
It is very easy to keep a consistent layout across all web pages. However, if you want to alter the layout for some pages, you need to define exceptions in the XSLT style sheets.
This method is unfeasible, if you want to maintain such a web site with more than one person.
You would need more than one tool to quickly edit a web page. In order to update an HTML or XHTML page, every ASCII editor is sufficient. You can also revise an XML document with a standard ASCII editor, but you additionally need the XSLT processor on your local computer for the transformation.
tbc.
Copyright © 2001-2003 by Rainer Hillebrand and Thomas Wierlemann