The XML Site Articles

Beyond HTML: why HTML is just not enough

Posted: August 30th, 2005 - Tuesday.

There are countless ways to create websites: from Notepad to complex Content Management Systems. The barrier of entry is very low and HTML seems deceptively easy. So why bother with anything else? [...]

Benefits of the XML and XSL technologies

Posted: September 3rd, 2005 - Saturday.

Ok, so I believe that HTML is just not enough, but why use XML and XSL? Why not PHP or today's latest personal publishing tool? What are the advantages over other technologies? When should we use them and when shouldn't we? [...]

XML and XSL tools and documentation

Posted: September 29th, 2005 - Thursday.

I am finally getting closer to the fun part now: creating web sites using the XML and XSL/XSLT technologies. First I will present the tools I am using, then the documentation where I am looking for answers to my questions. Then I will create the files and automate all the transforms. [...]

Starting out with XML and XSL

Posted: October 28th, 2005 - Friday.

At the minimum, what we need to create a website is the XML content file and XSLT processing sheet. We will also add an XML schema to that, because it adds structure to the XML file, ensuring correctness. Of course, the files must be placed into a corresponding directory structure and hooked into the automated build scripts. [...]

Fixed or flexible page width?

Posted: November 8th, 2005 - Tuesday.

I can't help myself and I'll start with the conclusion: please, please, PLEASE don't fix the width of your website! It hurts my eyes every time I encounter such a website. And quite a few of my favourites, places I visit daily, employ this awful layout technique. Why, oh why? [...]

XML Schema and XSL templates for a web site

Posted: November 27th, 2005 - Sunday.

Now that we have everything we ned to start out, let's define the XSL Schema and XSL templates that we can use to generate a minimal web site. First of all, we need to decide on the layout of the website pages on disk. [...]

XML Schema and XSL templates for web articles

Posted: December 14th, 2005 - Wednesday.

Last time we defined an XML Schema and a set of XSL templates to generate a web site. We implemented generic, minimal web page support. This time we will particularize it for a very common subclass of web pages, articles. [...]

Processing the titles of recursive page sections

Posted: December 15th, 2005 - Thursday.

We've left the sections, titles and paragraphs in the article in a simple, flat view. However, the whole reason we permitted recursive sections was to be able to show them as such in the generated HTML page. Let's see how. [...]

Generating Tables of Contents for web articles

Posted: December 19th, 2005 - Monday.

A Table of Contents is a nice addition to a web article, and also a great application for our framework. When done manually, TOCs are hard to create and maintain. They get quickly out of sync with the article's content and are very error prone. This is where XSLT comes to help. [...]

Links in Tables of Contents

Posted: January 18th, 2006 - Wednesday.

We've created the article Table of Contents last time, but we finished without one very important element: links from the TOC items to their respective sections. [...]

Generating Tables of Contents Revisited

Posted: February 3rd, 2006 - Friday.

After finishing the TOC XSL templates, I was rather unhappy with the result. The code itself was messy, complicated and using the templates was not very flexible. Specific behaviors were controlled by sheet-wide parameters making impossible having two different TOC styles in the same XML. [...]