Re: Multiple versions of a web page

Hi,

There are various ways to use the technology.  After the general
page is created, the universal page can be created and stored in
the web sites hierarchy.  This would avoid uncacheable web pages
if that is a problem.

The reason I proposed three levels of approaches was to offer
various options depending on the situation where the web page
is being developed.  The lowest level might be useful for places
where getting the web site done by Tuesday is more important
than maintaining the purity of a structured language.  For those
places where they have more resources or time, they could implement
the self-configuring level or the XML level.

CSS is not currently a reliable approach since support for it
ranges from browser to browser.  Another problem is that it
adds another language that the developer has to learn.  Some
developers have the time to do that.  Others may have limited
time or resources and will kludge what they need to.

Actually, the lowest level can be rather easily implemented.  For example,
I have a very basic perl script which can extract a universal web page
from a standard web page which contains the appropriate extractor
comments.

Scott

> > However, suppose that when the web page designer creates the web page,
> > additional information is stored in the web page to direct the extractor
> > on how to create a universal web page.  For example, the web page designer
> > could include a special comment to the extractor like:
> 
> I believe the BBC does something like this, however the result is 
> uncacheable pages.
> 
> More of concern is that one is simulating a structural markup language
> in the comments of what *is* a structural markup language, and thus
> perpetuating the abuse of structural features for presentation.
> Unfortunately many designers won't realise that that is what you 
> are doing, because they fail to understand that HTML is really
> structural.
> 
> If a designer is capable of thinking clearly in terms of the 
> "basic web page" structure, they will probably have little problem
> with CSS approaches.  If they can't think clearly in those terms,
> the additional markup-as-markup-comments is going to be a last 
> minute bolt on.
> 
> I think any of these approaches will only work for organisations,
> like news organisations, that mass produce pages in similar styles,
> not the business creating a promotional web site.
> 
> Finally, even if you don't use main stream markup, there are, I believe,
> constructs in SGML that can indicate additional structure without
> having to hide things in comments.

Received on Thursday, 20 December 2001 11:01:27 UTC