XSLT + XML + CSS
Blogging continues to dwindle the number of personal home-page designers these days. People simply prefer to "blog" (which recently got coined as an english verb). Back in the days, when everyone was out there trying to put up a homepage on the internet, there were only a very few who would frequently update their pages with new content. If you were one of them, you would certainly have experienced the pain to update content. HTML templates came along the way but the extent to which they saved html design time was limited. New content still needed to be formatted, positioned, etc.
Web designing/coding soon started becoming more "structured" with the emergence of CSS. Since web-code carried such enormous amounts of fonts, a CSS-like construct was apparent. I also have been dying to add a comment on Javascript, the only other scripting tool (the other is vbscript) that been around since 1995. I feel Javascript was designed without the thought of future compatibility. It lacks intelligent abstraction. Its a "loose" language and lets you do things in ways in which you wouldn't expect other languages to.
Going back to blogging. It's really a two-step process: compose and publish. Recently, I have been thinking of implementing a blog-like architecture for updating my homepage. Apart from so many solutions, the simplest i could think of is using XML to carry content, and XSLT to carry out the transformation required to convert the XML to HTML. I am also planning to develop an application in C# which simply converts my composed text to XML format. The application would look similar to the "compose" box of email accounts. CSS can also be nicely integrated into XSLT, and different CSS fonts can be selected by the user from a drop-down box in the composer application during content composition.
I am pretty sure this is how news-websites update their content. They simple want to blog all their content on to the webpage, and avoid the hassle of redesinging. I am thinking more in the lines of a class of software which can serve as an interface to your webpage. For now, I will experiment with making the composer application for my homepage, and if all goes well, I will have developed a small blogger for my homepage.
Web designing/coding soon started becoming more "structured" with the emergence of CSS. Since web-code carried such enormous amounts of fonts, a CSS-like construct was apparent. I also have been dying to add a comment on Javascript, the only other scripting tool (the other is vbscript) that been around since 1995. I feel Javascript was designed without the thought of future compatibility. It lacks intelligent abstraction. Its a "loose" language and lets you do things in ways in which you wouldn't expect other languages to.
Going back to blogging. It's really a two-step process: compose and publish. Recently, I have been thinking of implementing a blog-like architecture for updating my homepage. Apart from so many solutions, the simplest i could think of is using XML to carry content, and XSLT to carry out the transformation required to convert the XML to HTML. I am also planning to develop an application in C# which simply converts my composed text to XML format. The application would look similar to the "compose" box of email accounts. CSS can also be nicely integrated into XSLT, and different CSS fonts can be selected by the user from a drop-down box in the composer application during content composition.
I am pretty sure this is how news-websites update their content. They simple want to blog all their content on to the webpage, and avoid the hassle of redesinging. I am thinking more in the lines of a class of software which can serve as an interface to your webpage. For now, I will experiment with making the composer application for my homepage, and if all goes well, I will have developed a small blogger for my homepage.
posted by rashed at 1:26 AM
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