Announce: w3make

[Stefan Kamphausen <kamphausen@novelscience.com>]

Dear XML-Developers,

when my employe asked to rewrite our website I decided to do that in
modern style: use XML to separate content and layout in a way.
Quickly I came across what seems to me to be a major fault in
XML/XSL(T): multiple input and multiple outputfiles were not
supported. Soon I found out that saxon provided a way to have multiple
output files (which by now has become part of XSL standard, too, which
is just fine :-)

Therefore I wrote this little perlscript that you can find at
http://www.skamphausen.de/software/w3make

It traverses an input (XML)-tree the structure of which is given by a
collection of configurationfiles (that use a make-like syntax,
therefore enabling everyones favorite editor to hilight and indent
things nicely). There are way to just copy files (e.g. useful for
tarballs, images) and ways to tell which XML-document to use and what
outputfile to generate. All inputfiles are packed into a Huge XML File
("HXF", the DTD for that is automatically generated) that represents the
input-tree-structure using <dir> and <page> tags. 

This HXF can then be passed thru saxon (which is currently used as
XSL(T)-parser). I'd like to change that to the perl modules XML::* but
when I put saxon in they were not quite ready.

I use w3make for the maintainance of 
http://www.skamphausen.de
and
http://www.novelscience.com
and I'd be happy to hear whether all you XML-monks consider this
script useful or whateveryouthinkofit.


Regards And Thanks For Your Help So Far
(without xml-dev I wouldn't be able to complete w3make)

Stefan Kamphausen



-- 
Stefan Kamphausen              <kamphausen@novelscience.com>
                                   http://www.skamphausen.de
Novel Science International GmbH
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