technical - Patrick Heusser, art, fractal, photos, fractal art, geschichten, photoart, fractalart, photo art, contemporary art, x8ing, buy, shop, dielsdorf.

Technical stuff about the page

This page is described in one single xml file. The xml file then is transformed into several html files (the whole page that you see here counts about 200 html-files). All navigation stuff, sidebar on the left side, 'previous' and 'next' links on the bottom of each page, the gallery pages and the full screen sites are generated automatic by the xslt 2.0 transformation. I use my own xsl transformation file that performs the work. So basically I developed kind of my personal content management system based on xslt. For validation I use a common dtd file.

My first xml/xsl experience and the conclusion

Due to it's my first real work with xslt transformation it took my quite a lot of time to realize my needs. Nerveless I quickly figured out the limitations of the current xslt 1.0 standard. To implement all my personal requirements I was indispensable to use xslt 2.0 although is currently just a draft (W3C Working Draft 12 November 2003).

Once I had my transformation complete it was very comfortable to add and edit the pages. No worries about the handling of images, links are automatic created and the navigation is generated too.

The main downside of the xslt transformation I see in the limited functionality and difficult maintainability. For sure this was my first try and may be the programming style was only best effort, but even simple things suddenly got complicated using xslt.

respect of the most strict HTML standards

The whole webpage is valid "HTML 4.0 Strict"! To check this for the current page please click the link to visit to the W3C validator official W3C testsite. Feel free to test the other pages as well. Further the page uses intensively Cascading Style Sheets CSS technology to separate the layout information from the html content. Please see my css file which styles all pages.