How This Site Is Built
This site's content is kept in XML files on the development server. When modifications are needed, the appropriate XML files are edited and then transformed to HTML using XSL stylesheets and the Apache Xalan XSL engine. The use of standard stylesheets ensures that navigation is kept synchronized across all pages.
Before publication, specific characteristics of the generated pages are checked using JUnit automatic testing tools.
Why?
One disadvantage to having this site on my ISP's machines is that my basic account doesn't come with any access to dynamic page services (like ASP, JSP, etc.) Since I wanted to use this site in part to demonstrate my programming skills, I had to come up with some way to automate at least part of the site building process, even though I could only have static HTML on the server.
In addition, I wanted to have a consistent look-and-feel to the site. Obviously, the use of Cascading Style Sheets helps a lot; but keeping the navigation bar consistent as I change the site layout was likely to pose a challenge.
So I decided to keep the actual content in XML files (which don't live on this server!) and use a combination of XSL and Ant tasks to rebuild the HTML files as necessary. (For more on this process, see the How This Site Is Built page.)
One side benefit of this method: I have to write well-formed XML; otherwise the build process complains.
A larger benefit is the fact that creating multiple versions is relatively easy. All I had to do to create both full-graphics and text-only pages was to build a textonly XSL template and update the Ant task...
Man, Do You Need A Life!
Yep, that's probably true. :-)
