Monday, September 22, 2003

Frontpage 

Frontpage has got my goat. Its truly and awful product. Why a company that can produce an excelent product like Excel can produce something this bad is beyond me.
The style sheets are gross. Its impossible in my view to actually go and change them. Its impossible to find decent examples on the web. So, I've given up on the idea of using it to build a home page.
Requirements are to host a blog, without banners. Well Blogspot handles the posting fine and I've got the pages set up without any problem. I'm slightly concerned that if I use Frontpage to publish, then its going to overwrite the blog. I can probably get around that with some dudicious use of directories.
Style wise, I want simple. Zen even. Left hand column for links with a banner at the top. Simple pastel colours. One or two of the Blogger templates have caught my eye. A quick look at the source and they are simple. Cascading Style sheets (CSS) for the formatting. I didn't really how powerful they are. Its clearly the way to go and to drop all the formating from the HTML. Going this route for the main website means that its possible to coordinate the schemes between the blog(s) and the main website. Like a lot of programming consistency matters, and only code it once, in one place.
As for producing the pages, I've coded them up in XML using XMLSPY. XMLSPY is the best XML technology tool going. XSLT, XSD etc with lots of tools to manage and make life easy.
I'm not sure of the approach to take. There are two that I can envisage. Either post the raw XML, but here I'm not sure about browser support. Alternatively, process the XML off line to produce HTML, and post the HTML.