It was thus said that the Great R. D. Davis once stated:
Quothe David V. Corbin, from writings of Sun, Feb 08, 2004 at 12:25:29AM -0500:
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.
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="boolean(preceding-sibling::page[@listindex
!='no'][position()=1]/attribute::filename)">
<li><a href="{preceding-sibling::page[@listindex !=
'no'][position()=1]/attribute::filename}{$global-extention}"
title="{preceding-sibling::page[@listindex !=
'no'][position()=1]/child::title}">Next</a></li>
</xsl:if>
<xsl:if test="boolean(following-sibling::page[@listindex !=
'no']/attribute::filename)">
<li><a href="{following-sibling::page[@listindex !=
'no']/attribute::filename}{$global-extention}"
title="{following-sibling::page[@listindex !=
'no']/child::title}">Previous</a></li>
</xsl:if>
<li><a href="{../page[@listindex !=
'no'][position()=last()]/@filename}{$global-extention}"
title="{../page[@listindex !=
'no'][position()=last()]/title}">First</a></li>
<li><a href="{../page[@listindex !=
'no'][position()=1]/@filename}{$global-extention}"
title="{../page[@listindex !=
'no'][position()=1]/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.
And this is with an open source XSLT processor running under Unix.
-spc (Then there's the issue of the size of the site ... )