Robert Koberg wrote:
<spipped description of forrest site.xml> ...
Wasn't this all a conversation from a couple of years ago?
Yup :-)
It is good to see opinions change...
Yup, things change. As long as we remain open to change and accept things that people need, things get better.
First, forrest's site.xml should change the element names to something generic, like:
<site label="My Site"> <page id="p34568656" label="Nico Page" url="newnicepage.html"/> </site>
So the site.xml can be validated. In its current state a custom schema would be required for each site.xml instance -- just doesn't make sense. The element names are currently being used as identifiers. Why not simply make them valid IDs?
The question is: why validate?
The schema would simply say that there are nodes and leaves. Hey, that's xml!
Ok, I'm partly serious and partly joking, but what I want to do is to make a version of site.xml that can be validated. And - hold to your seats - I will take Anakia's navigation.xml for this purpose. So I can make us render their sites *and* get validation, all in one go :-)
Also, much more site/folder/page metadata can be applied to nodes to trigger certain things in a transformation.
Yes, in fact what we would like to do is say if Forrest should treat that doc as a resource or as content to render.
Next, why wouldn't you recommend using the site.xml as the site structure?
The site.xml should be a *virtual* representation of the site. This way
(with a validatable site.xml) it is easy to build a tool (in javascript)
that can manipulate it.
It's already the navigational structure. The left-havd navigation is *all* done from site.xml.
The static site gets generated from the site.xml using the site.xml as a main Source xml for a transformation. This way all nav and content links can *always* be valid base on the virtual representation.
Yes, this happens, but with a twist: the links in site.xml get translated to the ones that are in the real content.
Hence I'm writing now a sourcemap, that makes it possible to decouple Forrest from the sources, and build a virtual source space.
Oh well, there is a lot of work to do, and I've just begun (*)!
(*) getting off projects I went to the core, and finally I'm free to think and code again! :-)
--
Nicola Ken Barozzi [EMAIL PROTECTED]
- verba volant, scripta manent -
(discussions get forgotten, just code remains)
---------------------------------------------------------------------