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)

Does SSI qualify as dynamically generated pages?

If it does, you can use Frontier, or something similar, and do the pages, then have the system render all of the pages, and publish them. BBEdit and a few other text editors have templating systems that can handle this sort of work, as well.

If you're willing to let the server do some extra work, you can set an Apache Handler to wrap the pages in a header and footer, or use mod_publisher. Netscape/iPlanet/SunOne have options to automatically insert a footer for all pages in a given directory, and I think you can do headers, but it's been a few years.

(The thing to remember is -- they'd be editing the base content of the pages ... this keeps them from trying to mess w/ something out of scope, and they learn to realize that content and layout are seperate (which they are, as you can easily change the header or footer down the road, and if they make desicions based on layout, it might cause problems later)

...

Personally, depending on how much I have to do, I just make a generic template, with a SSI in the middle that calls an include based on $PATH_INFO. (the only problem is, you can't set the title dynamically except based on $PATH_INFO)

In reply to Re: Failings of web languages to address reasonable demands by jhourcle
in thread Failings of web languages to address reasonable demands by punch_card_don

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