The Construction and Administration of a Dynamic Web Site

Abstract

The web site of a research team inevitably raises the problem of the page-maintenance Indeed it has to display ongoing research along with work already accomplished. The different categories of documents constituting a web site are the different pages presenting the laboratory"s activities, staff and collaborations, the research work proper (publications, pre-publications, demos, programs and information concerning distribution lists, for example), plus events (internal seminars, conferences, news, and current Web events). Such documents can differ considerably in presentation and duration. The webmaster"s major difficulty in this case is to group all these elements, to update them and, in many cases, to summarize them in order to format them for inclusion in the site. This manual task is difficult to perform and it generally involves the checking or re-writing of links. Moreover, when the guiding principle behind the site is modified, the webmaster often has a significant number of pages to re-write. We have written a set of scripts enabling efficient management of such a web site. In the technical solution we have adopted, the web site is described (in XML) as a master document composed of fragments of documents, and the task of the webmaster becomes that of a news-editor sorting through forms to determine which documents to present together with their appropriate formats. A set of stylesheets and procedures makes it possible to normalize documents. The entire solution relies on the XML, XSL (T), CSS technologies, with a presentation in HTML4.0. All documents have metadata in the RDF-Dublin-Core format.