More XSL translated websites

I have written before that, over CMS- or Wiki-based website, I prefer static websites, and that with a bit of magic with XSL and XML you can get results that look damn cool. I also have worked on the new xine site which is entirely static and generated from XML sources and libxslt.

When I wrote the xine website, I also reused some of the knowledge from my own website even though the two of them are pretty different in many aspects: my website used one xml file per page, with an index page, and a series of extra stylesheets that convert some even higher level structures into the mid-level blocks that then translated to XHTML; the xine website used a single XML file with XInclude to merge in many fragments, with one single document for everything, similarly to what DocBook does.

Using the same framework, but made a bit more generic, I wrote the XSL framework (that I called locally “Flameeyes’s Static Website” or fsws for short) that is generating the website for a friend of mine, an independent movie director (which is hosted on vanguard too). I have chosen to go down this road because he needed something cheap, and he didn’t care much about interaction (there’s Facebook for that, mostly). In this framework I implemented some transformation code that implements part of the flickr REST API, and also a shorthand to blend in Youtube videos.

Now, I’m extending the same framework, keeping it abstract from the actual site usage, allowing different options for settig up the pages, to rewrite my own website with a cleaner structure. Unfortunately it’s not as easy as I thought, because while my original framework is extensible enough, and I was able to add in enough of my previous stylesheets’ fragments into it without changing it all over, there are a few things that I could probably share again between different sites without needing to recreate it each time but require me to make extensive changes.

I hope that once I’m done with the extension, I’ll be able to publish fsws as a standard framework for the creation of static websites; for now I’m going to extend it just locally, and for a selected number of friends, until I can easily say “Yes it works” – the first thing I’ll be doing then would be the xine website. But I’m sure that at least this kind of work is going to help me getting better understanding of XSLT that I can use for other purposes too.

Oh and in the mean time I’d like to pay credit to Arcsin whose templates I’ve been using both for my and others’ sites… I guess I know who I’ll be contacting if I need some specific layout.