[thelist] What is the best way for delivering dynamic web content.

Julian Voelcker asp at tvw.net
Thu Oct 31 08:43:01 CST 2002


Hi All,

I have developed a number of website where I have used an ASP or ASP.
Net code to call data from a database and then add it to a template
page and then display it as html.

More recently with .Net I have used a mix of server controls and
usercontrols for making up the page, starting with a basic page
template containing one control for the menu, another for the core
content, another for some dynamic content on the right of the page,
etc.

This has worked fine, however I have only been dynamically generating
part of the html page (ignoring header info etc) and now want to
dynamically generate all of the html so I can include content specific
meta tags in the header, different style sheets and page layouts based
on the user's browser's abilities, etc.

I currently only target web browsers, but now also want to be able to
target WAP and PDAs.

What is the best way of approaching this?

Currently all the content is stored in a SQL2k database, with minor
elements like title, keywords, descriptions, etc being stored as
straight text and more extensive content being stored as XHTML in a
text field.

I can quite easily create code to build up the html string for the
whole page, however the buzz seems to point to storing the data as XML
and then using XSLT to convert it for the required platform - is that
as efficient as a compiled server control and SQL combination?

Whilst on the subject, I always generate forms as stand alone documents
on the site, handling the processing in the code behind - are there any
easy methods for generating these dynamically?

I look forward to hearing your views.

Cheers,

Julian Voelcker
Cirencester, United Kingdom





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