Chapter 1: Introduction

What does XT stand for?

XT stands for XML Templates, because XT templates are simply XML documents which are a combination of XHTML and specialized XML tags. XT is the template language and rendering engine used by Sitellite to generate web pages for visitors.

What does XT do?

Sitellite uses the XT template engine to compile the different components of the web site user interface together for the web site visitors, including the content, the graphic design, and any programming code required to render a given web page.

Content means any piece of information on the site that conveys particular meaning (ie. the specific subject matter of a page), in contrast to the graphic design, which provides general or relational meaning (ie. web site navigation) and brand reinforcement.

Content types

In Sitellite, there can be any number of content types. Typically, these will include:

• Web Pages
• Web Files (ie. PDFs, Word documents, etc.)
• News Stories
• Event Listings
• Sidebars (ie. lead-ins to other content types)

Template language

XT templates are ordinary XHTML documents with the addition of XT-specific tags that are replaced with actual content by the template engine.

Simple server-side templating language

The need for XT is that XHTML on its own doesn't have the ability to talk to external sources, such as the Sitellite content repository, to retrieve content. So with XHTML, every page has to have the content completely mixed in with the design, or else you have to use some sort of intermediate processor to put the two together on-the-fly.

Traditionally this was done using programming languages such as Perl, Java, or PHP, however these are far too complicated and usually only result in mixing the design with the programming code instead of the content, which is still a problem.

To solve this problem, we created XT, an intermediate language which is much closer to standard XHTML and therefore less complex than a full-blown programming language, but still powerful enough to solve the problem of joining the content with the graphic design of a web site.

The traditional method of simply storing each page in HTML format breaks down quickly because the content writers need to either bother themselves with HTML, or need to rely on the graphic designers to actually apply the content changes. This adds an unnecessary step to each and every content change made to a web site.

So the benefit of using a template language such as XT is that by storing your web site content separately from your web site graphic design, you make it possible for the people responsible for each of the two to manage their part themselves.