Have you considered cascading style sheets (css) for layout instead of tables. I'm using that for my web sites and I think it tends to simplify things. Use Cocoon to build the html element structure and css to layout the web page. This way you do not have to worry about getting the different parts of the page in the correct table layout element. The basic layout of our Commerce Housing website at http://commerce.wi.gov/housing/ is css based.
Gary T. Schultz Web Technical Administrator / GIS Coordinator Wisconsin Department of Commerce 6th Floor P.O. Box 7970 Madison, WI 1-608-266-1283 -----Original Message----- From: David Swearingen [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, April 08, 2004 5:04 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Best Way to Build a "Traditional" Website Structure Using Cocoon? Newbie question: I am designing a dynamic website and have chosen Cocoon as the architecture. The website will contain a 'classic' structure, with left navigation, masthead, footer, and a body section containing content. The various elements, like the navigation, surrounding the content will rarely change of course. I will define these in XML. So there will be a leftnav.xml, masthead.xml, footer.xml. In a typical website like this the whole thing is in an html table, and the top row of the table contains the masthead, a left cell contains the navigation, the right cell contains the body text, and the bottom row contains the footer. Very straightforward, done all the time. I've built numerous sites like this with Struts and other tools. Now imagine the request comes for a page, like faq.html. I know how to make Cocoon grab faq.xml and run it through a XSL transformer to add the html markup and then serialize it out. Done this already. But for my website I need to generate the entire table context for the page, then insert the masthead html, then there's more html that closes the table cell and opens a new one, generates the left navigation html from leftnav.xml, closes the cell, spits out my content from faq.xml, etc., you get the picture. Ideally I want my page structure html -- the code that defines the overall page table that holds all the elements -- in one file, and the masthead, navigation and footer in their own files, and then of course the content documents are in their respective xml files. This makes for easy site maintenance. So what's the best way to do this in Cocoon? It seems it could be accomplished in numerous ways, but I have a feeling there's a best-practice here. Thanks, David __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Small Business $15K Web Design Giveaway http://promotions.yahoo.com/design_giveaway/ --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
