XML Publishing with AxKit

Other Dynamic XML Techniques

While XSP is the dominant dynamic XML tool, there are other options, which may be appropriate in some cases.

Aggregate Data URIs

An aggregate data URI is simply a way to combine content from more than one source and present it as a single URI-addressable resource. While the uses for this technique are many, the most obvious and intuitive use is building collections of metadata about all or some documents on a given site. Suppose you are publishing an online newsletter. In each publishing period, you publish a few articles while archiving the old ones. Obviously, one feature that such a site needs is an article index—you do not want the older content to be forgotten and rendered useless just because it is not featured in this period’s issue. Furthermore, you know from experience that such indexes are more useful to your visitors when they contain more than just a list of hyperlinked titles. They need a greater level of detail (date published, article summary, etc.) about how the archived articles are presented in the index. When faced with this task, developers traditionally go one of two ways: they either choose to create and maintain the index by hand, or they store the archived articles in a database and use a script to generate the index dynamically. Using XML, AxKit, and aggregate URIs offers a novel, third choice: you can set up alternate styles for the articles themselves to automatically extract the metadata you need, then combine those article-specific ...