XslWebMaker - Intro
What is it?
XslWebMaker makes a static website from XML files. Specifically, it is website development tool that facilitates your use of XSL (XSLT and XPATH) to transform source XML files into a website of XHTML pages. It runs on Windows only. It's available at XslWebMaker - Download and Setup.
Why would you use it?
It eases the maintenance of your website by allowing you to have a single place to edit repeating text. For example you can have one file for your navigation menu. Changes to the navigation file will get transformed to all the web pages that share that navigation menu.
The transformation takes place on your development computer before uploading the website. This reduces the load on the web server compared to other techniques, for example when using server side includes.
You can employ all the power of XML and related techniques. For example, allowing the complete separation of data from presentation.
It's free.
Limitations
Non-ASCII characters can't be in source .html files as they don't transform. This includes:
- Non-Ascii literals, eg the euro symbol.
- Named Entities, eg
€ - Numeric Character References, eg
€
It runs on Windows only.
Programming and Markup skills used to Make XslWebMaker
As the user of XslWebMaker you don't have to be knowledgeable in these skills.
- WSH
- Used to process source files, trigger Microsoft's XML Core Services (MSXML), and clean up the output directory.
- JScript (JavaScript/ECMAScript)
- The programming language used in WSH files.
- XML
- Source files are in XML. Either pure customised XML or largely XHTML with some XML additions.
- XHTML
- The resulting output, after the transformation of the XML source files have occured.
- XSL (XSLT and XPATH)
- The language(s) that define how transformations of XML sources into XHTML should occur.
- .BAT
- Initiates WSH files, copies supporting web files (eg .jpegs and .css).