Re: New KDE web site.

[Joakim Ziegler <joakim helixcode com>]

On Mon, Nov 06, 2000 at 11:21:53AM -0500, Elliot Lee wrote:
> On 4 Nov 2000, Owen Taylor wrote:

>> I tend to agree with Joakim here that ditching WML would be a good
>> idea - WML is a pretty amazingly cludgy tower of M4, Perl, its own
>> variable substitution and 2 or 3 other things (!).
 
> It does the job nicely from the perspective of the web developer, and
> happens to be implemented using a cludgy tower. The latter is less
> relevant than the former for the purposes of this discussion, since the
> cludgy tower just happens to work.

Except we're using the unsupported, old version of that kludgy tower, which
people have reported not being able to even build on some systems, because of
the lack of Auto* and so on.


>> And since we're using a mix of WML and PHP, we'eve lost the main
>> advantages of WML - static content and the ability to test without a
>> web server.

> This is because Joakim decided that he wanted to use PHP as much as
> possible, not because things are not reasonably implementable in WML.

I used PHP for dynamic pages, instead of the other proposed solution, which
was to generate some include files with external scripts using cron, and then
using server-side includes to put them into the dynamic page, which I
consider a more kludgy solution. Much like WML mentioned above, this just
happens to work.

Once again, I think this is a useful discussion to have, but I also think
that in the very end, the people who are going to develop the site will have
to make the decision. I think there's sufficient evidence that large, heavily
used sites can indeed be built both with PHP and WML, and there is some
indication that Zope can also be used, so which one to actually use is to a
large degree up to the implementors.

I think we should dispell once and for all the myth of high processor load
because of PHP use, though. This simply isn't an issue on modern hardware.

-- 
Joakim Ziegler - Helix Code web monkey - joakim helixcode com - Radagast IRC
      FIX sysop - free software coder - FIDEL & Conglomerate developer
            http://www.avmaria.com/ - http://www.helixcode.com/