Welcome to XWeb

XWeb is a set of tools to generate complete websites out of a set of input files in different formats, most noticeably XHTML and your own XML formats. It tries to achieve the following goals:

• complete separation of content and layout
• semantic representation of the content in any XML format
• easy editing of the website, including the addition/removal of pages

Some of the most important features for achieving these goals are:

• XSLT processing for input XML files (including chains of stylesheets)
• rendering of buttons and banners using either internal renderer or SVG
• adding of information relevant for navigation structure into XSLT process

XWeb should address three different user groups by its layered architecture:

• people who know XML/XSLT can use the automation of XWeb while keeping full control. All XWeb input files are text based, every function can be called using command line interfaces. The main input file can be seen as an XML based makefile for websites.
• if you want more convenience you can use existing stylesheets and just insert your content. You still have some options to change the look by changing the input graphic files or by setting parameters for the generic stylesheet supplied with in the XWeb distribution.
• application-specific frontends allow easy point-and-click creation of typical websites, e.g. a description of a person or a photo album. These interfaces will not be very flexible but they will be very easy to use (planned).

Currently the first two steps are implemented: you can write your own XSLT code to get exactly the results you want or you can use the generic stylesheet and you will not even have to take a look at any XSLT code. The latter is of course less flexible but the stylesheet offers a number of parameters to control the general layout aspects like the navigation position and structure and CSS can be used to change more than just the details of the look -- take a look at the the online manual to see how far you can get. The manual uses only the generic stylesheet: no specific XSLT code and no images except for the screenshots.

If you have further questions after reading the website feel free to ask us on the mailing list or in the web forums -- use the link at the bottom to go to our project page.