I'm new to XML but do have a fair amount of web programming experience. I'm working on a project where some documentation will be marked up in XML and then displayed as web pages. The kicker here is that the content needs to dynamically display based on who is looking at it. For example, I might have some data that is marked up as
<topic audience="sales">
... blah blah blah ...
</topic>
<topic audience="accounting">
... blah blah blah ...
</topic>
The idea is that someone would be logged in as a salesperson and would only see the sales info. This in itself does not seem that tough, but I'd also like to take just the titles of the other topics and display them with links at the bottom of the page, maybe under a heading like "Related Information". This makes it a little tricky to just use XSLT, since I need to access the data as a tree rather than just piece-by-piece in sequence. What is the best way forward on this? My first instinct is to use a DOM/JavaScript approach to manipulate the data, but I worry a bit about cross-browser display issues a slow load times. We do have ASP on our servers (yeah, I'd rather be using LAMP, but it's not my decision), so I could also do a little scripting to process things as they come in.
I realize that this is a ridiculously broad question, but I'm kind of overwhelmed by all the options available to do this sort of thing and I want to make sure I'm following best practices. References to good HOWTO web sites and/or books would also be appreciated.
Thanks,
Alex
<topic audience="sales">
... blah blah blah ...
</topic>
<topic audience="accounting">
... blah blah blah ...
</topic>
The idea is that someone would be logged in as a salesperson and would only see the sales info. This in itself does not seem that tough, but I'd also like to take just the titles of the other topics and display them with links at the bottom of the page, maybe under a heading like "Related Information". This makes it a little tricky to just use XSLT, since I need to access the data as a tree rather than just piece-by-piece in sequence. What is the best way forward on this? My first instinct is to use a DOM/JavaScript approach to manipulate the data, but I worry a bit about cross-browser display issues a slow load times. We do have ASP on our servers (yeah, I'd rather be using LAMP, but it's not my decision), so I could also do a little scripting to process things as they come in.
I realize that this is a ridiculously broad question, but I'm kind of overwhelmed by all the options available to do this sort of thing and I want to make sure I'm following best practices. References to good HOWTO web sites and/or books would also be appreciated.
Thanks,
Alex