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RE: Streamline xslt


Hi,

> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-xsl-list@lists.mulberrytech.com
> [mailto:owner-xsl-list@lists.mulberrytech.com]On Behalf Of Geoff
> Sent: Thursday, September 26, 2002 5:15 AM
> To: xsl-list@lists.mulberrytech.com
> Subject: RE: [xsl] Streamline xslt
>
>
> Thanks Robert. This makes some sense. It seems similar to what the
> Fusebox methodology uses for layouts. Have you found this to be flexible
> enough for completely different html based designs? I am no sure that it
> is flexible enought. It may be, I'm just not sure. I will give this a
> try and let everyone know how it works.

I find it to be very flexible. My designers seem to always come up with multiple
ways to torture me. We have started building all of our sites with pure CSS,
which the layout below would require. But you could just as easily use tables
(or heaven forbid, nested tables).

I have two states in which the layout below is used:
- authoring time
- site-generation/page-preview time

I use two different URI resolvers for the different states which allows me to
make the page editable during authoring time  and a regular output HTML during
generation/preview.

The key (for me) is to have some kind of site definition or config file that
describes the site hierarchy and the folder and page properties. For example:

<config id="clean2" nav_col="tabs_narrow_left" p_nam="label"
site_index="siteindex" subtitle="Storyboard" title="Clean Site"
use_tool_style="1">
  <folder display_label_link="false" expand="false" id="f1"
index_page="siteindex" label="Home" name="en_us" pager="true" snailtrail="false"
status="editorial" xsl_fileref="basic_3col.xsl">
    <col type="narrow_right">
      <article id="c413186147"/>
    </col>
    <page display_label_link="true" file_ext=".html" gen="true" id="siteindex"
label="index" metadata="true" print_friendly="true" status="editorial"
title="Clean Index Page" toc="true" xsl_fileref="homepage.xsl">
      <col type="wide_center">
        <article id="cindex"/>
        <article id="c1919458443"/>
      </col>
    </page>
    <page display_label_link="true" file_ext=".html" gen="true" id="p353715906"
label="page 2" metadata="false" print_friendly="true" status="editorial"
title="page 2" toc="false" xsl_fileref="default">
      <col type="wide_center">
        <article id="c165658989"/>
        <article id="c655899760"/>
      </col>
    </page>
....
<snip/>

I always transform against a config file like above and get the folder nodeset
and the page nodeset. With these I can know explicit details about the page
view. And, importantly, I know the location of the page *relative* to all of the
other pages/folders in the site. This type of thing will not scale to super
large sites (especially without a GUI or much more server-side work), but I am
focusing on smaller scale sites (80-90% of whats out there??.

Content pieces (basic articles, in the case above) and defined in their own
config XML and referenced in the site config XML. When assigned at the folder
level they appear on all pages in that folder.



best,
-Rob



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