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This developer documentation seeks to describe the fundamental building blocks and choices which go into creating a completely custom web site with HyperContent.
The code base for HyperContent has been developed with the philosophy of attempting to accommodate the unforeseen; there are no assumptions made about the structure of a web site, of information or navigation architecture, supported media types or data structures. There is an XML grammar defined for specifying the directory structure of a web site and defining certain semantics and relationships of components within that structure. At the most granular level of data, the built-in-tools rely on XML DTDs to define data structures, and RDF to support metadata structures. The generation of HTML or PDF can be accomplished through built-in support for XSL transformations, while a filtering architecture leaves open the possibility of plugging in other templating languages. Data reuse across multiple pages is accomplished through the use of XML Includes. Built-in authoring tools support a broad number of applications, while a framework makes it easy to plug in additional authoring tools and mix and match different authoring tools as required in a given project.
The tradeoff for all of this flexibility is that developing a new site from the ground up can be a bit daunting, as there are many configuration choices that can be made, and much thought must go into the development of DTDs to define data structures and the use of XML includes and XSL to automate construction of site navigation. As you get started developing with HyperContent, you may want to read through this and build up a project as you go. Once you are fluent with the process, you will likely still find it useful to refer back to these pages for useful tidbits.
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