Techniques for self-maintaining
web sites
Julia Collins
NOAA-CIRES Climate Diagnostics Center
In this talk, we describe our experiences using Cascading Style
Sheets (CSS), document templates, Apache environment Server-Side
Includes (SSI) and a variety of flavors of custom code to create
a flexible Web site for the Climate Diagnostics Center. The
goal of this design was to meet the needs of both an external
user community as well as the internal staff that creates, maintains,
and uses the contents of our Web site.
Many software systems exist for creating and deploying Web hierarchies.
At the Climate Diagnostics Center, only a small fraction of
our staff is dedicated purely to Web service design and maintenance.
We therefore rely on many different individuals throughout CDC
to maintain a substantial amount of our Web content. These individuals
have a variety of computing environments on their desk tops
and have varying levels of expertise. Our challenge was to create
a development and maintenance environment that enables this
diverse "support staff" to produce a web site that is reliable,
documented, secure, accessible and consistent in its appearance
and navigational structure.
To achieve our goals we compromised between the extreme of using
a single software package and that of hand creating all of our
documents. A variety of techniques were employed to achieve
flexibility in our Web site architecture and the resulting documents.
Our Web site development tools included Cascading Style Sheets,
document templates and dynamic document generation via Apache
Server-Side Includes. The end effect of this structure is to
separate the content from the layout of the document. This allows
page authors to use their preferred editing tool to create their
page content, and then insert the content into a simple template
file which handles the navigation elements and graphics that
give the site a consistent look.
This talk will present the details of the technology used as
well as information about strategies for implementing this complex
change in a diverse community of Web content developers. We
will review security and accessibility considerations, and discuss
the Java Server Page and Servlet technology which may support
the next generation of our Web site architecture.
Auditorium
- Paper
Wednesday - 11:30 - 12:00 A.M.
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