[thelist] XML vs HTML for Content Management

[Norman Beresford]

Hi all

I've got a question which has I've been pondering a lot recently.  I've
built a site featuring a lightweight CMS This allows non-technical authors
to add/edit/delete features and news on the site without having to know
anything about HTML coding.  The system adds each new article to a database,
and at the same time writes a page of HTML to disk, so that any browser
hitting the site reads a static page.  If any editing is carried out on the
page it simply overwrites the existing HTML page.  The system also
automatically updates things like the front page and various archive pages.

Now I've been reading a lot about XML, how it's the future of website
management/production etc, and I've been wondering how useful it would be
for this (and similar sites).  I know most of the big name CMS are built
around XML, but I just can't see the advantage.

The main advantage sited for it is that it allows you to serve up different
flavours of a page according to the browser hitting the site.  For instance
a WAP phone gets a heavily cut down version, whilst an IE user gets the full
treatment.  However this requires server side processing.  First of all
sniffing the browser, then processing the XSL/XML to generate the
HTML/WML/whatever.  And this has to occur everytime that a browser hits the
page.

Using my system I can carry out this server side processing once, when the
article is generated, and instead of just spitting out one version of the
article I can produce a number of varients.  Then I browser sniff once, when
the user hits the site, and they get redirected into an appropriate
directory, containing static pages tailored to their browser type.

Am I somehow really flawed in my thinking?  I've got a data repository to
enable me to change the site appearance quickly (I just alter a template and
then process then the whole db) and browsers are served static pages
tailored to their client with the minimum of server side processing (and
I've always thought that the golden rule of web production was to get
content to the client as quickly as possible).  How could using XML, with
it's additional load serverside, possible improve my situation?

Norman