Changes in the publishing system on bclary.com

For those of you who care (which is probably just me), a short to note to explain some changes in the back-end processes on this site.

From .xml0 to .xhtml0

The use of a distinct XML document format for articles proved to be more trouble than it was worth. The main problem had to do with being unable to easily specify additional styles or scripts to be included in the output html documents. Since the separate XML format added little of value, a modified multi-namespace form of XHTML is now being used as the original source for all articles and compositions.

Die application/xhtml+xml!

Previously, the output of the build process created XHTML documents with xhtml extension and and identical transitional HTML version with html extension. Apache's content negoatiation and URL rewriting allowed me to serve XHTML to Mozilla and HTML to down-level browsers like MSIE. This complicated processing and did not add any real benefit while causing some problems due to the differences in the DOM in HTML vs. XHTML.

The build process now looks like .xhtml0→(process metadata)→ .xhtml9→(navigation wrap)→.html

Replaced Articles no longer in Index pages

Articles which have been superceded by another Article are no longer listed on the index pages.