Copyright
Copyright 2005, Samuel Penn.
Redistribution and use in source, binary and printed forms with or without modification is permitted. See the full license text for details.
Copyright 2005, Samuel Penn.
Redistribution and use in source, binary and printed forms with or without modification is permitted. See the full license text for details.
PageXML is a document format similar to Yagsbook, but much simpler. It is used to describe simple content, but includes tags which allow more complex site structures to be embedded into the site.
For example, to import a complete encyclopedia, an <import-encyclopedia> tag would be inserted into the page. This would be picked up by the Xalan parser, and encyclopedia articles could be fetched from a CVS repository, and hundreds of pages of encyclopedia articles (including maps and other associated elements) would be automatically generated and inserted into the site.
The pages on this site have all been generated using PageXML.
PageXML is designed to provide a consistent look and feel across a web site. The output is valid XHTML (if it isn't, it's considered a bug) which can be easily tweaked with CSS.
Using XHTML directly can give the same effect, except by taking a step back with an abstraction layer, it is possible to radically change how a site is structured by changing the PageXML XSLT.
By using a mixture of Ant and XSLT plugins it is possible to automate certain tasks when a website is constructed, referencing these tasks directly within the structure of each page.
PageXML allows documentation sets and encyclopedias to be generated and linked to when the site is built. This is useful since such information is often kept seperate from the site itself.
One thing XML is very bad at is talking about XML. Due to having to escape < characters and the like, any pages which need to display XML code are difficult to manage.
PageXML contains structures for describing an XML document, and the stylesheets generate coloured markup on output. This feature was added so that the Yagsbook format could be easily documented.
