I’ve used server-side packages for websites and I’ve done hand-coded HTML. Hand-coding is a simple way to start a site that won’t have too many pages, but what do you do as the site grows? Suppose you’ve got a menu along one side that lists all your pages. Every time you add a page, all the pages have to have that menu updated. The usual solution to this is with a handy bit of Javascript for nice dynamic menus (that may or may not pop up an error message with every mouseover) or some PHP to fill in the details as needed. These are both valid. I want a template for the common parts of the page and a source document for the content that populates each unique output page (that is, the static web page that the end user can read). Since I’ve been monkeying with XSLT lately, I decided to try reworking my pages into an XML based format. My needs are pretty straightforward, so I thought this would be a good learning experience.
Read the rest of “Going from HTML to XML and back again”…