Publishing techniques for web sites have evolved almost as much as the web publishing standards have evolved. Since the protocols that allow clients and servers to communicate on the worldwide web are well defined and designed for interoperability, things can be simplified by looking at just one side or the other at a time. For example, when looking at web publishing from the perspective of content being delivered to the client browser, the wide variety of ways that a server can produce content can be ignored. From the client perspective, the evolution of web publishing techniques from the simplest to the most sophisticated would include:
Single-purpose web pages coded using the 1997 HTML 4 standard
possibly, separately-generated printer-friendly versions
Well-formed XHTML web documents
Repurposing of XHTML content
Content produced in well-formed XHTML format can be easily transformed for other publishing channels. This is a good technique for providing device independence without duplication of content.
The current version of most browsers will perform the transformation automatically, which offloads some of the dynamic processing otherwise performed on the server. The browser versions which are required are:
Some examples of repurposing content to allow a web site to be viewed from cell phones and other mobile devices, as well as traditional web browsers include:
You can visit these sites from both a mobile device such as a cell phone and traditional web browser to see the difference in presentation among different devices. You can also do "View Source" to examine how repurposing works.
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Using templates for common elements
Be sure to choose a design tool that supports templates. The advantages of using templates include:
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Separation of content and presentation
Recognizing the difference between the actual content of a web site and how it can be presented is valuable in terms of understanding what information can be provided and the various ways it can be delivered to users. For example, syndication of the content might be possible by providing the same information in an RSS feed.
IMO, separation of content from presentation is even more valuable than CSS, which allows applying the same styles to specific content layout elements. For example, if you have a table layout for a product catalog and another table layout for a shopping cart, you can easily apply the same styles to both. In many cases, however, designers want those things to be easily recognizable and wind up adding selectors to apply different styles to the same element types. Once you get to the point where styles are being applied only to one group of elements on a page, the value of separating out the styles has been lost.
Single-source publishing
Single-source publishing is a method of delivering information to various types of devices from a single source of content. This can be accomplished by separating the informational content itself from the markup code for various presentation formats. For example, the information from a single content source could be formatted in a number of different ways for delivery to handheld devices and printers in addition to traditional web browsers on desktop or laptop computers. The disadvantage is that by simply repurposing the same content for different devices, the amount of information may not be appropriate for the other types of devices. For example, if an online article consists of multiple web pages, you would have a separate printer-friendly document for each page of the article and those pages might be too large for delivery to mobile devices with small screen sizes.
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Multi-level publishing
In multi-level publishing, the content has a hierarchical structure that allows delivering content from different levels of the hierarchy to different types of devices. For example, if an online article consists of multiple web pages, a document created in a printer-friendly format should include the entire article as a single document. For cell phones and other types of portable devices with small screen sizes, such as smart phones and mobile PDAs, the content should be delivered in smaller pieces. The hierarchical structure of XML documents is well suited to supporting a multi-level content structure and is therefore the basis for the application of this technology which is used by XML Styles.