Storing XML/Streaming HTML

[Rob Williams]

Michael:

Thanks for the vote of encouragement. As for generating the HTML and storing
it in static form I thought about that but then I thought, well most
accesses to the document are going to be to very particular little pieces,
i.e., they will see a topic list or search for something and get back a list
of sections and then most accesses should just be per topic (which might
only be a couple of paragraphs). Here's how I saw that happening (and PLEASE
feel free to shine a light on this, I am truly an XML newbie):
	1. I create a TOC and a document map of some sort. (I know I don't
really need these things in XML since the document structure itself holds
the document side and when browsers support it they will be able to just
present the view side.) So what I'm talking about here is being able to say
read all the chapter tags and present them through a servlet, so the user
goes to the opening page to our document and gets something that looks like
this:

	Policies and Procedures
	I. Overview
	II. Employment Practices
	III. Compensation and benefits
		A. Benefit Time for Employees

and of course each one would be a URL which would invoke the same servlet
w/a different parameter. So for instance the URL for Compensation and
Benefits might be:
	www.acme.com/servlet/pnpmanual?chapter=3
	2. My servlet would respond by asking for Chapter 3 through the
parser (as I understand it this is where SAX comes in, right? I am looking
for an excerpt so a scan of the tags occurs instead of reading in the whole
document? Well, then again, since this servlet is going to be serving this
document up to all comers, if it does build the whole thing in memory maybe
that isn't such a disaster?). 
	3. Anyway, once I get back the text from the node I've requested,
then I am going to just stream it out using the response stream of the
servlet to the user. Finally, in thinking about the application of styles,
maybe what I should do is allow them to goof w/an XSL file on the server and
then just apply the style info to the XML before it gets streamed to the
filter to be translated into HTML?

Thanks,

Rob Williams
RobCo Incorporated




-----Original Message-----
From: Michael Kay [mailto:M.H.Kay at eng.icl.co.uk]
Sent: Friday, December 04, 1998 7:44 AM
To: xml-dev at ic.ac.uk
Subject: RE: Storing XML/Streaming HTML


> I'm helping a company ... make their policies and procedures manual
> available as an online reference. I am thinking that it makes
> sense to mark
> it up as XML: it is 1000 pages and contains lots of chapters and
> subheadings. Anyway, the question is, have people gone this route yet, of
> marking up some text in XML and then streaming it to the client
> (browser) as HTML?

Author it in XML definitely. What I would do with it then, given that this
is a static manual, is to generate HTML at publication time and store the
generated HTML on the server in the normal way. That's heresy to many on
this list, but to my mind it gives the best performance and the least system
complexity. Of course if you're planning a fancy interactive experience for
your readers the answer might be different.

Mike Kay


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