Who is WXT for

[ Scenario 1 ][ Scenario 2 ][ Scenario 3 ]

WXT may be used at different levels and may be engaged in different tasks, alone or together with other tools. It is potentially both an administration tool and a production tool. To make a coarse statement of usability, it is fair to say that:

WXT is not effective for:

• large heavy duty websites that depends on highly dynamic content management.
• novice publishers that starts FrontPage, type something and hopes for the best.

It is mainly targeted at:

• small companies, working groups or indivuals that maintain non-trivial websites with multiple sources with a reasonable need for dynamics.
• authors that want to publish on different media in different formats.

The best way to understand the possibilies and limitations is to read the documentation, the scenarios below or investigate the examples you may download from Download.

You should have som basic knowledge of XML before you start using WXT. At least you should be able to write well-formed XML. The functionality relies on some simple XPATH-expressions. The page XPATH may serve as first-aid. You will find some usefull references on the page References.

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Scenario 1

The authors story

I am a teacher of computer science and have an ambition of maintaining a few rich websites for the main topics I am teaching. I want, in addition to the website, to produce handouts, printable material, overheads and occasional reports of different sorts. All based on the same source of material. I also want to share parts of my material with collegues and I want to borrow material. An integral part of my educational strategy is to include students works in the source material. As a teacher in Computer Science it is vital to be able to present snippets of programcode in different formats. This code must be up to date, all changes in sourcecode must be reflected in the material.

It is obvious from the description above that the need for dynamics is moderate. I can rebuild everything or the affected parts whenever I do changes in some parts of the material.

I have two basic choices when preparing material with the intentions above.

• I can produce material in a rather strict XML-dialect of my choice and produce web-pages through some transformation. This way I disciplin myselft to a straight format and I have kept backdoors open for alternative transformations of reasonable complexity. DocBook is an obvious candidate for production according to this strategy since tools are availabe for a series of interesting transformations.
• I may consider the pages on the website as the main documents. In this case I will probably produce XHTML in the contentfiles. Not necessary in the same sorroundings and with the same stylesheet as I use in the templates, but it may be browsable. The advantage of this approach is that I have a lot of tools available for production and proofreading, before I submit the source material to WXT.

WXT lets me follow any of the strategies above. It makes no difference if there is one or many authors or if your sourcematerial is in different locations.

The sites below are maintained with WXT, from a lot of different sourcematerial, programcode files, XHTML-pages, text files:

Computer Graphics, in Norwegian.
Markup and Web, in Norwegian.
.Net programming in C#, in Norwegian.

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Scenario 2

Listbased publishing

Assume that the basic material can be described in a rather simple XML-structure, for instance a fairly homogenous list of items. The items may be orders, images, spare parts, brochure pages or any type of items you would like to sell, produce or maintain. WXT may help you organise and publish these items in any order or organization you want, on any format you prefer.

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Scenario 3

Cooperative work

Assume that a document or website should be maintained by any number of contributers on the internet. This document may be a website or a document ment for printing. You can set up a script for WXT that collect material from predefined URI's an produce the latest version of the document. The format of the contributions may be defined specialy for the task at hand or it may be according to an open standard.