maintaining thousands of WWW pages

   Date: Thu, 18 Jan 1996 17:01:23 +0000
   From: oshea@bosheasrv0.rtc-tralee.ie (Computing  Brian O'Shea)

   I'd really appreciate your comments on this approach, and would be
   delighted to discuss it further.

If I understand correctly, you're talking about generating actual
files of HTML by starting with a template and then applying data to it
to expand the template into real HTML.

It seems to me that this works better in some cases than others,
depending on the specifics.  For example, if there is one template
that's rather big, and you have to run the same template on many
pieces of data, you could end up with quite a lot of HTML files.  For
example, the template might print out a nicely-formatted description
of a PERSON in your database, and it might be applicable to 10,000
PERSONs, where you have some items of data for each PERSON in a
database system.  Pregenerating all those pages could use a lot of
disk space.  If you typically just expand each template once, the
problem isn't nearly as bad.

Also, if you have to wait until the next day to see the updates, that
might be fine or it might be a problem, depending on the application
area.

You might want to take a look at

 http://www-unix.oit.umass.edu/~osteele/lhtml/

for an example of something that I think is related to what you're
doing.

-- Dan

Received on Thursday, 18 January 1996 17:30:31 UTC