Page 347 - Open Soource Technologies 304.indd

Unit 13: Extensible Markup Language

Time and budget were allocated to renovate the site to better serve HyperWrite’s business Notes
needs, and to serve as a practical example of the company’s capabilities.
Reasons for the Site Renovation
When it was decided to completely revise the site in 2007, one of the prime motivators was
to move to being fully standards-based (XHTML and CSS). But the reasons for updating
the site were not only technical.

Analysis of the Website logs over a 12 month period showed the most popular area of the
site was the knowledge part (where magazine-style articles relating to technical documentation
and Help technologies were published). It was decided to give that area greater prominence.
The services offered by HyperWrite were better categorised into training, consultancy and
conferences (rather than lumped together as services).
The Web logs also showed that Firefox was used on average by 15% of site visitors.
Considering the rate of Firefox adoption is increasing, the percentage for the last month of the
year would be a lot higher. Previously, when HyperWrite was mainly providing Windows
Help systems consultancy, we could assume that our target audience nearly all used Internet
Explorer for browsing. The greater importance of open systems in our business was another
argument towards fully embracing XHTML.

The site had many inconsistencies, accidentally introduced over the years via editing tool
changes and style changes. Any site revamp will provide the opportunity to standardise the
pages, but it was keen to find a way to reduce the likelihood of the site drifting in future.
The Role of XML
XML is great for enforcing standards; if a document does not conform to its XML rules, it
would not save! But there are hundreds of XML languages. For Web sites and similar types
of content, the most appropriate XML applications are RSS, DITA, DocBook and, of course,
XHTML.
DITA plays an increasingly important role in HyperWrite’s consultancy and training
business, so it wanted to include DITA content in the site. As the project developed, a site
map format was required to store information about the structure of the site. As ASP.Net
was the technology platform on which the site would be deployed, the ASP.Net “sitemap”
format was an option, as was the “ditamap” format.
ASP.Net and Visual Web Developer
Some portions of the site, such as the newsletter subscription page, required server-side
processing. Previously, the site had used Microsoft’s ASP technology for this purpose. The site
was, and would continue to be, hosted on a Windows 2003 Server with Internet Information
Server, that supports both ASP and ASP.Net. Contd...

LOVELY PROFESSIONAL UNIVERSITY 341