Web Generator
=============
Motivations
-----------
Ever since I discovered `XML`_ and `XSLT`_, I've been looking for an easy and
confortable way to keep content and presentation totally separate. I started
using `XWeb`_, which is a good program, but with some problems:
* it's written in Java (OK, OK, this is personal taste)
* it "tweaks" files to add (navigational) information, and I thought it was
not necessary
* it does (did?) not have dependency control functionalities (like make)
Shortly after version 0.3 I lost sync with the official codebase because of
some modifications of mine, and I did not follow later developments.
Given the high level of correctness attained by the `Gnome XSLT library`_, I
decided to try and look if it was possible to use just xsltproc and make to
obtain the same results.
So I developed a DTD to describe the structure of the site, a stylesheet to
convert this structure into a makefile, and retouched the stylesheets to keep
them working after the modifications.
How it works
------------
Given a description of the site's structure in the file sitemap.xml, the
stylesheet compile.xsl generates a Makefile containing rules for the
transformation of every page, along with their prerequisites.
In this way calling make causes the regenaration of only those files whose
source have actually been modified. Moreover, each stylesheet implicitly gets
two parameters: sitemapuri containing the URI of the sitemap relative to the
stylesheet, and active which is an XPath expression indicating, inside the
sitemap, the node corresponding to the page being transformed. This way the
stylesheets can access all relevant navigational information.
You can consult the site's sources.
.. _`xml`:
http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml
.. _`gnome xslt library`:
http://xmlsoft.org/XSLT
.. _`xweb`:
http://xweb.sourceforge.net
.. _`xslt`:
http://www.w3.org/TR/xslt
