Re: The current discussion is good, but...

[Kyle Olsen <jedimstr gifttree com>]

On Fri, 17 Nov 2000, Matt McClanahan wrote:

>One option could be to design the site such that content and presentation
>are seperated, allowing more than one interface to the website's content.
>The downside is it would increase the scope of the project somewhat,
>potentially harming maintainability.

I agree wholeheartedly with this suggestion, but disagree with the qualifier 
tagged on to the end. Good seperation of content and presentation are, as
Martha Stewart would say, A Good Thing.

I don't think having a level of seperation expands the scope of the project
too much, and it has a tremendous *beneficial* effect on project 
maintainability. Problems are much easier to locate, diagnose, and patch, and
usually tend to be limited to the scope within which they were created.

Speaking of seperation, this:

***********************************
*** GNOME.ORG WEBSITE ***
***********************************
	/\	\/
********************************************************
** CONTENT ACCESS ABSTRACTION LAYER***
********************************************************
	/\	\/
*******************************
*** WEBSITE CONTENT ***
*******************************

is a simplistic, though well-proven, methodology. It protects any changes
in the interface from impacting the content, and vice-versa. It also allows
for more easy internationalization, and (so long as the abstraction interface
remains consistent) easier modification of *how* things are done, without
affecting what the results look like to the user.

The technology this is done with is irrelevant, though I lean towards Perl and
PHP (in that order) for web development.



Kyle Olsen
jedimstr gifttree com

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