Evolution of an organizational Web site: migrating to XML/XSL

Abstract

With the advent of the World Wide Web, many organizational Web sites were initially created by a group of individuals who were interested in this new technology. These people were (and still are) often referred to as Webmasters and designed,the pages according to their taste and picked the information that they found important. Many sites were built without a systematic approach or consideration for future requirements. As the World Wide Web increased in importance, many of these Web sites grew, in an ad-hoc fashion and they became increasingly difficult to manage. Today, Web site design and management are further complicated by new emerging requirements such as multi-lingual and mobile device support. In this paper, we first discuss the evolution of an organizational Web site, give a brief overview of the site's history and discuss the problems the organization faced. We then present some of our experiences and lessons learned in re-engineering the site from HTML to XML/XSL. Many Web sites will have to make similar transitions once the XML/XSL standards firmly establish themselves as the Web technologies of choice. One of the goals of this paper is that other organizations should be able to benefit from our experiences.