[NTLUG:Discuss] what is the best Linux web page developing tool?

[Christopher Browne]

On Tue, 20 Mar 2001 12:50:00 CST, the world broke into rejoicing as
"Richard C. Cobbe" <cobbe at directlink.net>  said:
> Lo, on Tuesday, March 20, Chris Cox did write:
> > I do recommend the server side approach, where some
> > kind of server side language (e.g. php, perl) is used
> > to create and manipulate content.  Just using HTML
> > templates is ok... but seems a little bit antiquated
> > nowadays (Chris says this realizing that the NTLUG site
> > is pretty antiquated).

> I'll agree with everyone upstream; server-side processing is the way
> to go.  Why do the work manually when the computer can do it for
> you?

> I do, however, have some problems with the unspoken implication that
> php/perl/brl/whatever are better than html templates just because
> they're newer.  (If this isn't what you're actually trying to say,
> Chris, my apologies.)

> These server-side scripting languages are no doubt wonderful if
> you've got dynamic content.  However, IIRC, the original poster was
> asking about tools for generating *static* content.  If that is the
> case (and he doesn't need to update these static pages too
> frequently), then I suspect that a server-side scripting engine
> would be overkill, both in terms of server resources and developer
> resources---why learn *another* language just to automate web page
> production?  Using a shell script to generate the static HTML files
> is certainly a much simpler solution, and it's quite sufficient for
> this sort of problem.

No outrageous thoughts here, to be sure.  I used to make quite
extensive use of scripts to do maintenance on my _relatively_ static
web pages.  [Aside: New modem has led to improved bandwidth of late,
thus meaning it is not outrageous to do an rsync each day to push out
updates More Regularly.  I digress...]

I used to have quite a horde of them to maintain internal links,
tables of contents, and such; I have since adopted DocBook/SGML as the
source format, which means that I need do _nothing_ to accomplish
this, as Norm Walsh's style sheets do the job nicely.  These days, I
take output from Jade, post process by adding header/footer material,
and use Dave Raggett's "HTML tidy" to further clean the results.
[Guaranteed standards conformance!]

> Call me old-fashioned if you like, but I'm a big believer in "the
> right tool for the right job".  Seems to me that using PHP to
> generate static content is a bit like using a semi-trailer to
> transport a single mass-market paperback.

Absolutely.

Likewise, I'd think it similarly silly to resort to Java Server Pages
when building static content.

The flip side: If you start by asking the question "What can I do to
automate the generation of the information?" that hopefully leads to
thinking of ways of automating even the generation of static content.

An interesting example is the Yahoo! Store.  It is probably the most
well-known example of a sizable web site implemented using Common
Lisp.  Strangely enough, it apparently uses CLISP, which is one of the
least high performance implementations out there.  But, oddly enough,
this _doesn't_ hurt performance.  

Paul Graham, creator of this, lists "Dynamic Generation" as one of the
top ten mistakes <http://www.paulgraham.com/mistakes.html> of web
commerce.

And he follows this principle; the way Yahoo! Store works is that a
batch job runs periodically to run the Lisp code to create HORDES of
static web pages for the store.  The interpreter may be pretty slow,
but it runs at 2am when everyone's asleep, so _WHO CARES_.  :-)

Producing scripts, in _whatever_ language you prefer, seems to me to
be a good way to help generate web material.

If the intended task is to create ShockWave-based pages, or to lay out
graphics, then a GUIed tool is pretty much mandated.  But I expect
that doing some pre-/post-processing using scripts is almost _always_
in good style.
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