[thelist] Discussing XHTML and ROI with your "boss"

[Michael Kimsal]

>
>
>> For example: Maybe I can take a personnel page on an intranet and
>> re-use the content on the public facing site. That might be one
>> example.
>
>
> How about this:  Using CSS to deliver differently formatted pages to IE
> 6 and NS 7?  Let's say your Intranet is standardized on IE 6 and you
> want to do some fancy scroll-bar formatting and other snazzy IE-specific
> formating.  But you also want to push out some of the data to an
> extranet and not have to make it IE-only.  Now this, admittedly, is not
> a feature of XHTML.  It's more of a general argument for the seperation
> of content and presentation.  However, XSLT will give you even more
> control and presentation options than CSS and XSLT needs more
> well-formed data to work on.


It seems you're saying you make one 'page', then grab that and process
it via
XSLT or reparse it to extract data.  If so, why do that?  If I've two
massively distinct agents to target, I'd just use two separate templates
(with XHTML or whatever in them) for the specific user agents.
Input comes in, gets processed, data for the template is returned
to the processing engine, which then calls the appropriate template(s).
 I don't
need XHTML for that, and it affords the ultimate in flexibility.

If someone else is trying to screen-scrape me, and can't easily parse stuff
because it's not XHTML, tough luck - I don't care if people take the
content,
but I'm not going to make it easy to nab.  If they want to contact me
directly
about a SOAP or XMLRPC interface, that's fine (or I'd put instructions
on how to do it on the site itself).

I don't see this 'retargetting' thing as that valid an argument for XHTML.

Michael Kimsal
http://www.logicreate.com
734-480-9961