This small, somewhat contrived website demonstrates the
Website document type. Website provides a system for building static
Websites from XML content.
A text-only version is also
available, demonstrating how multiple presentations can be derived from
the same sources.
A website is a collection of pages organized, for the purposes of
navigation, into one or more hierarchies. In Website, each page is a
separate XML document authored according to the Website DTD, a customization
of DocBook.
Website imposes the following additional constraints:
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Each webpage must have an ID and
the IDs must be unique across the entire website.
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No page can occur in more than one location in the
navigational hierarchy of the website. Note, however, that you can have
pages, such as the about page,
that don't appear in the navigational hierarchy at all.
In order to build a website with Website, you must have:
I've completely redesigned the way the Website doctype works for
V2. In version 1, all of the pages in a website were part of a single,
monolithic XML document.
Making all of the pages part of a single document had a number
of drawbacks:
It wasn't convenient to update only part of a website
(only the pages that had been changed, for example).
For very large websites, there were memory issues associated
with parsing and formatting the whole thing.
There was no practical way to publish the XML content of
a site.
It was difficult to share pages across different web sites.
It was very tedious to setup a system that allowed
the same content to be published
with different navigational hierarchies.
Website overcomes all of these difficulties.
In fairness, the old style had some advantages:
There was only a single source document to maintain.
Navigation was derived automatically from the structure
of the source document.
Link checking was cheap and easy.
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20 Mar 2001 |
Reworked using the Website paradigm.
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25 Mar 2005 |
DocBook html chunking was hacked to accomodate the Website paradigm.
Consequently we can embed books in the website and cascade the website TOC
all the way down to the leaves of the book! Is that not cool I ask you?
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