Phil got
me: Not to be another "me too" on Ingo's redesign, but what's up
with this ;)
<meta name="GENERATOR"
content="Microsoft FrontPage 5.0">
<meta name="ProgId"
content="FrontPage.Editor.Document">
Good point. Ok, let me tell you how this site has been created and show
you a little bit of its magic.
-
I
created a layout prototype in Photoshop. It looked exactly the same
way the website looks now.
-
Cranked open FrontPage to "translate" my image to HTML until
it really looks the same way as my initial Photoshop drawing.
-
Split the page up in header, content, footer areas and put the first
and latter into some magic ASCXs.
-
Done.
So, what's the cool part about this site? It's the magic behind the
scenes. For example, whenever you access an HTML page (like this) the complete
header, menus, etc. are generated dynamically by an http handler I inject into
the request pipeline. This handler takes the content out of the "real" HTML
file's <BODY>, detects the current context by looking at the path,
generates the correct menu structure based on this content, and renders the
complete thing in a templated way.
But that's not all it can do. If the .html file doesn't exist, the
handler looks for a .XML file in the same location (for example the real source
for this one is
actually that
one). It will then detect the namespace used in the XML, and render it using
for example this
XSLT. So, why did I do
this? Because I can later on also use this
XSLT to render PDF output instead of HTML.
Well.
There's one more thing: URLs are immutable. I used a bunch of http handlers
and magic rewriting rules to forward to the current location of the pages. This
way, Dave's link from last
year which pointed here is
still valid, even though I changed blog tools twice and even switched
domains.
Rocks?
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