It was thus said that the Great R. D. Davis once stated:
>
> Quothe David V. Corbin, from writings of Sun, Feb 08, 2004 at 12:25:29AM -0500:
> > When my firm sets up a site that has over a hundred pages (just counting the
> > "static" content) and then client say "change these logos", "move the tool
> > bar from the top to the left", or other quite common changes, we would
> > quickly go broke if we decided top open each of the pages and manually
> > modify the HTML.
>
> Why not just hack a short perl script (or a shell script using various
> other UNIX-land tools like sed, ed, etc.) to make the changes? You
> could even use some slightly longer and slightly more complex scripts,
> C code, or whatever suits your fancy, to automate things a step
> further.
Nice if you have inhouse staff to do that. Then there are maintenance
issues of the code base (along with the data for the site). Here's a bit of
XSLT that let's me define links to the next and preceeding pages within a
section of my site:
<xsl:if test="boolean(preceding-sibling::page[_at_listindex !='no'][position()=1]/attribute::filename)">
<li><a href="{preceding-sibling::page[_at_listindex != 'no'][position()=1]/attribute::filename}{$global-extention}" title="{preceding-sibling::page[@listindex != 'no'][position()=1]/child::title}">Next</a></li>
</xsl:if>
<xsl:if test="boolean(following-sibling::page[_at_listindex != 'no']/attribute::filename)">
<li><a href="{following-sibling::page[_at_listindex != 'no']/attribute::filename}{$global-extention}" title="{following-sibling::page[@listindex != 'no']/child::title}">Previous</a></li>
</xsl:if>
<li><a href="{../page[_at_listindex != 'no'][position()=last()]/_at_filename}{$global-extention}" title="{../page[@listindex != 'no'][position()=last()]/title}">First</a></li>
<li><a href="{../page[_at_listindex != 'no'][position()=1]/_at_filename}{$global-extention}" title="{../page[@listindex != 'no'][position()=1]/title}">Last</a></li>
Now, imagine this is part of a company site and I leave my current
development position (promoted, new job, whatever). Next guy that comes
along now has to maintain this; there's only a handful of people I know that
have even worked with XSLT and they're not local to where I am.
And this is with an open source XSLT processor running under Unix.
-spc (Then there's the issue of the size of the site ... )
Received on Sun Feb 08 2004 - 01:23:03 GMT