I not sure whether you mean:

• you want to store the content, and not the HTML in this database, or...
• you want to store both in the database

In either case (thought not so sure you'd want to try the latter), what you are proposing is nothing new. In fact, unless I'm not reading correctly between the lines, you are talking about a database-driven content management system (to make it sound important). This is the underlying structure for more and more Web sites, and is the future.

Before joining the order of Perl Monks, I used to store all content in flat files, and HTML in the Perl scripts that would pull the content from the files and then render the HTML pages as "here documents."

Well, those days are gloriously over. Thanks to HTML::Template and MySQL. The latter makes content storage and retrieval nice and tidy, and HTML::Template allows you to build and maintain standalone HTML pages with placeholders for the content to come later. Perl scripts pull content from the database and H::T renders the HTML page with the content inserted.

Of course, you will need to supply a GUI for your users (can be done through something as simple as HTML forms or as complicated as the Microsoft DHTML Editing Component).

I hope I got what you were asking, it's just that the practice is so common today that I thought I might have missed the point of your question. Apologies if I did, and write on if I didn't.

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