Meritorious Monks, You ever get the impression that something that should be reasonable is simply impossible within the existing web framework?

Here's what I want right now for a web site I'm re-doing for a client:

  1. A single content page template that non-programmers can dump content into in a wysiwyg editor on their local machine and be instantly web-publishable
  2. a central style definition that is applied to all content pages
  3. normal http serving, not dynamically generated pages
  4. centralized page layout html (à-la SSI)

A deceptively simple sounding list of desires.

Yes, I can serve static html pages by pre-merging the templates with the content, but this introduces a separate generation step that authors either have to take care of themselves, or has to be programmed as a cron job and authors have to wait until the job runs to see their changes.

Yes, I can have the page layout html served by Server Side Includes, but then the authors can't see the page layout locally on their machines while their adding content.

Perhaps the solution is an online web page editor. Something that runs on the server, so that pages are displayed with their Includes and their CSS intact even during editing. To solve the template/generation problem, it would be able to extract the content from existing pre-generated pages and apply it to a new template when the template is updated. And it would of course be Perl-based so I can fiddle with it.

But IS there such a monster?

Or something else?

Or am I unreasonable?




Forget that fear of gravity,
Get a little savagery in your life.

In reply to Failings of web languages to address reasonable demands by punch_card_don

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