Re: Auto-Generated HTML and Authoring Tools

|Can anyone enlighten me on the latest thinking regarding the
|interplay of auto-generated HTML and HTML authoring tools?

This really asks two questions: first, how can I integrate contextually-variant
content (determined by the world of possible requests) with commercial WISIWYG
authoring tools, which I cannot answer; second, the one Paul addressed, how can
I create HTML templates that get "filled-in" in the right place with the right
stuff at the right time.

The only thing I can add to Paul's comments is to ask: "Wither <OBJECT>?"

OBJECT was a proposed [1] tag that would allow for HTML to be integrated into a
container document much in the same way that IMG provides a feature for inlined
images.  This document has lapsed for almost a year, so make of that what you
will.  Its possible that XML will allow for this kind of functionality, but
deployment of that doesn't seem imminent.

Until we get something like OBJECT or SGML compliance on the web client, I am
working on a DMS that uses a combination of SGML tools (James Clark's heavy but
compliant SP package [2]), a custom script driven by plain-old make(1) to
pre-cook on the server-side.  It basically determines which standard,
DMS-specific entities (header, footer, ...) occur in an HTML-like template with
the script and creates an SGML file with the entity values resolved and
declared in the prologue.  Finally, sgmlnorm is run on that to produce a
servable HTML file.

-marc

[1] http://www.w3.org/pub/WWW/TR/WD-object.html
[2] http://www.jclark.com/

-- 

Received on Wednesday, 29 January 1997 20:17:20 UTC