RE: Separating Document Content from Structure (was RE: inline CSS - score so far)

Walter Ian Kaye wrote
<snip/>
> In fact, it's often necessary. (btw, that's sepAration...;)

Oops, spelling is not my strong suite [sic].  Thanks. :)

> But how can the file know how many records (or whatever
> items) there will be?

I didn't mean to imply the src attribute values were anything
but arbitrary pointers to external sources of element
content.  They could all have values pointing to various text
stream providers on various servers.  But, if you do want to
generate a page with elements repeated while incrementing
something in the src attribute value, XSLT will do this rather
handily.

><snip/>
> Eeesh. What I do is create an HTML template file (I like to use
> *.htpl as a naming convention) and put placeholders in it:
>
This is essentially a formal way to do just this...  In fact, I
was wondering about an actuate or other value to specify
server-side processing of the xhtml 2/xlink syntax Murray
provided:
     <a xlink:href="frontmatter.xml"
       xlink:show="embed" xlink:actuate="onLoad"/>

>
> Then a Perl CGI slurps the file into a variable, does some s// on the
> placeholders, and serves the result.
>

Yes, this is a good way to do things, and delivering a single
self-contained (except for images, objects/applets,...)
document is very efficient, though I always consider proxy
caching.  (Let's face it, 99% of stuff on the web does not
change frequently enough to justify page builds on demand, and
server disk space is CHEAP.)  Also, not all of us are allowed
to run server-side scripts, and there is no reasonable cross-
plarform way to do this (yet) when publishing on static media
such as CD-ROM.

In addition, the robust web sites everyone seems to want the
standards to enable tend to have a great deal of the same
content repeated throughout.  (Think of a complex document with
ToC, Outline, Index, Glossary, and so on.  If you change a word
in a heading, you better go track down and change all of its
occurances.  And let us not consider navigation bars,
remembering frames are evil;). It seems a method to include
external content sources has many of the advantages of
including external stylesheets.

Received on Thursday, 24 February 2000 12:19:27 UTC