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About swarm.org
This collection of pages is built from a single XML document
using Norman Walsh's Website doctype (a
customization of the OASIS DocBook XML 4.0 DTD). It is converted
to HTML for the web using an XSLT stylesheet (which
is a customization of the XSL DocBook
Stylesheets). There are a number of compelling reasons to maintain these pages in
XML rather than HTML. The navigation buttons and hierarchy of the
website is automatically generated from the XML nesting
structure, without needing to manually create navigation
links. In other words, a new level to the menus is
generated every time a new webpage is nested inside
another. Traditional printed documents are desirable for
several of these pages. Using a more
structurally rich format to represent the documents makes it
possible to produce print as well as online versions. All of the intra-document linking is
automatic. The XML system provides validation
for the intra-document links, so there is no danger of broken
links. (Links to external pages still have to be validated by
an external program.) Migrating these pages to future versions of HTML
or other XML DTDs will only require new or updated style
sheets. No pages will have to be recoded, and the pages
will conform to whatever output format is required, with no
possibility of random human error.
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