From spc@conman.org Sun Feb  8 01:23:03 2004
From: spc@conman.org
To: test-drb@ccmp.vtda.org
Subject: [OT] HTML usage...
Date: Sun, 08 Feb 2004 01:23:03 +0000
Message-ID: <20040208072303.20E3010A2361@swift.conman.org>
In-Reply-To: <20040208070246.GF21247@rhiannon.rddavis.org>
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It was thus said that the Great R. D. Davis once stated:
>=20
> Quothe David V. Corbin, from writings of Sun, Feb 08, 2004 at 12:25:29AM -0=
500:
> > When my firm sets up a site that has over a hundred pages (just counting =
the
> > "static" content) and then client say "change these logos", "move the tool
> > bar from the top to the left", or other quite common changes, we would
> > quickly go broke if we decided top open each of the pages and manually
> > modify the HTML.
>=20
> Why not just hack a short perl script (or a shell script using various
> other UNIX-land tools like sed, ed, etc.) to make the changes?  You
> could even use some slightly longer and slightly more complex scripts,
> C code, or whatever suits your fancy, to automate things a step
> further.

  Nice if you have inhouse staff to do that.  Then there are maintenance
issues of the code base (along with the data for the site).  Here's a bit of
XSLT that let's me define links to the next and preceeding pages within a
section of my site:

<xsl:if test=3D"boolean(preceding-sibling::page[@listindex !=3D'no'][position=
()=3D1]/attribute::filename)">
  <li><a href=3D"{preceding-sibling::page[@listindex !=3D 'no'][position()=3D=
1]/attribute::filename}{$global-extention}" title=3D"{preceding-sibling::page=
[@listindex !=3D 'no'][position()=3D1]/child::title}">Next</a></li>
</xsl:if>
<xsl:if test=3D"boolean(following-sibling::page[@listindex !=3D 'no']/attribu=
te::filename)">
  <li><a href=3D"{following-sibling::page[@listindex !=3D 'no']/attribute::fi=
lename}{$global-extention}" title=3D"{following-sibling::page[@listindex !=3D=
 'no']/child::title}">Previous</a></li>
</xsl:if>
<li><a href=3D"{../page[@listindex !=3D 'no'][position()=3Dlast()]/@filename}=
{$global-extention}" title=3D"{../page[@listindex !=3D 'no'][position()=3Dlas=
t()]/title}">First</a></li>
<li><a href=3D"{../page[@listindex !=3D 'no'][position()=3D1]/@filename}{$glo=
bal-extention}" title=3D"{../page[@listindex !=3D 'no'][position()=3D1]/title=
}">Last</a></li>

Now, imagine this is part of a company site and I leave my current
development position (promoted, new job, whatever).  Next guy that comes
along now has to maintain this; there's only a handful of people I know that
have even worked with XSLT and they're not local to where I am. =20

  And this is with an open source XSLT processor running under Unix.

  -spc (Then there's the issue of the size of the site ... )

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