RE: A "one size fits all" personalized web page?

Hi, Bruce

In my discussions I have been only focusing on web pages which are
generated dynamically.  Underlying that is the assumption that the
people who are managing the web site have decided that there is enough
reasons for the web pages to be generated dynamically and that they have
the appropriate resources to develop and maintain the web site.

My premise is that there is NO reason for requiring web pages which are
generated dynamically to use style sheets.  The style sheets will
benefit only such a small percentage of people who are using dynamically
generated web pages that the effort to create them could not be
justified for that reason only.

The information being used to create the web pages can be stored in many
ways, e.g. databases, XML, etc.  The purpose of the web site and the
types of resources which are available will influence the web site's
developers' decisions about how the information is stored and how the web
pages are created.

I'm not saying that there is never any reason to use style sheets with
dynamically generated web pages.  There might be a few applications
where the information is stored such that using style sheets might be a
reasonable approach for presentation.  However, the choice of using
style sheets is being driven by how the information is being stored and
probably NOT by the possibility that some users might want to have
personalized style sheets.

Scott


> Scott Luebking wrote:
> > Using XML/XSL to dynamically generate web pages to send to the
> > server makes more sense than applying style sheets to HTML.
> 
> That depends on the nature of one's site.  Is your web content server fast,
> in-house, and have a high speed persistent connection to the Internet?  Do
> you have an IT shop to at set up (and maintain) dynamic pages and database
> driven content?  Does your content change all that much or is it fairly
> static?  How much content are we talking about, multi-kilobytes or
> multi-megabytes?
> 
> I think your argument makes sense, but only once an organization has grown
> to the point that they have decided to move to a *WHOLELY* database-driven /
> dynamically-generated-content (.asp, .cfm, .cgi) architecture.
> 
> -- Bruce Bailey

Received on Thursday, 20 January 2000 15:13:42 UTC