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Web Technologies-I

Notes For page editing, FrontPage was discounted as an option, because of its inability to work in
pure XHTML. Adobe DreamWeaver was considered, but Microsoft Visual Web Developer®
(VWD) was selected as the page editing software. VWD is a solid XHTML and generic XML
editor, with an integrated CSS editor. Its primary role, though, is as a Web application
development tool for ASP.Net. A single editor could therefore be used for programming of
server-side logic, and for any static Web pages.
ASP.Net allows easy server-side XSL transformations of XML content that provided an XSL-T
file is already available for the transformation. The task of creating an ASP.Net page to turn an
XML data file into HTML can take as little as 30 seconds. Similarly, if a site map is available
(in the ASP.Net “sitemap” XML format), a dynamic table of contents (TOC) for the site can
be created instantly. As soon as the sitemap is updated, the TOC is automatically updated.
Architecture

The Web site’s new architecture is essentially a three column design, with major navigation
buttons in the left column, the main content in the centre, and sidebar information in the
right. A branding banner and a breadcrumbs trail run across the top of the design, and a
footer block along the bottom.

The branding banner is an ASP.Net “included page”. As the server delivers a page to the
browser, it inserts the included page content at the top. The actual banner code only occurs
once, in the included page itself. It is re-used on every page in the site. If the banner needs
to be changed, only the included page needs to be altered.
The breadcrumb trail is automatically generated through a standard ASP.Net design-time
control. The design-time control simply references the sitemap XML file, and automatically
generates the breadcrumb trail.

Likewise, the main navigation buttons in the left column are derived through a design-time
control referencing the same sitemap XML file. The ASP.Net sitemap XML file format follows
a simple sitemap/sitemapnode/sitemapnode structure. For the HyperWrite site, the sitemap
XML is generated (through an XSL-T file) from a ditamap file.
To further simplify matters, ASP.Net provides a “master page” feature, which allows common
(repeated) elements of a page to be locked into a template-like skeleton. The new site uses a
master page to set the banner, breadcrumbs, navigation, sidebar and the footer block. This
leaves just the main content to be composed for each page.
The main content can be:
normal XHTML, typed directly in Visual Web Developer

RSS, transformed on the server by an XSL-T file
DocBook or DITA XML, transformed on the server by an XSL-T file.

The transformed RSS, DITA and DocBook content is dynamically placed within the master
page template.
Like the banner, the footer block is an included page.

The sidebar was used in the previous design, and was intended to carry snippets of news,
hints and related links. However, experience shows that the material was very rarely updated,
and was often stale. This was probably because we focussed on keeping the main content
up-to-date. If we did not happen to notice that the sidebar information was obsolete, it
would never get changed.
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