Member Avatar for mayb

i'm doing my final year project, require some opinion/input to whether my idea is workable.

a dynamic web page like newsletter require frequent update and is widely written in ASP/XML with macromedia dreamweaver for the layout web.

my idea is to combine the above two into one application of GUI based. Which allow the designer to drag and drop component into the page as a template only. This page will then be converted to XML page.

The actual text and images will be input at the input page which inserted into SQL database.

Main objective is to ease the job of web designer without writing complicated code. What they need to do only to layout the page, name all the component, do the text input.

Please share your view. thks

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  • Latest Post Latest Post by tgreer

Dani AI

Generated

— good idea and definitely doable. The simplest, most maintainable pattern is to separate three concerns: the template (what the designer arranges), the content (language-specific text and image references), and the renderer (the process that merges them into final HTML/email/print). Keep the template structural and semantic — components should be named and typed (headline, teaser, hero-image, body) rather than carrying arbitrary markup. That keeps content entry predictable and translators happy.

Treat each template as a small XML document with stable component IDs that the content editor binds to. Example template fragment:

<template name="newsletter-compact">
  <component id="headline" type="text" bind="headline" />
  <component id="hero" type="image" bind="heroImage" />
  <component id="body" type="html" bind="bodyHtml" />
</template>

For multilingual content, use UTF-8 everywhere and standard language tags (e.g., en, fr, ar). Store translations keyed by content key + language and record context (where the string appears) to help translators handle plurals and genders. Keep images as assets referenced by key or path rather than embedding binary blobs in content rows. Example storage table:

CREATE TABLE localized_content (
  content_key VARCHAR(100) NOT NULL,
  lang CHAR(5) NOT NULL,
  value TEXT,
  PRIMARY KEY (content_key, lang)
);

Practical operational tips: enforce a small, well-documented component set before expanding; validate/sanitize any rich HTML to prevent broken layouts and XSS; provide preview per language and device because text lengths and directionality vary; support fallback to a default language; offer CSV/PO export for translators; version templates and pre-render/cash pages for performance. As observed, keeping the editor separate from the rendering engine lets you target multiple outputs (web, email, print) with the same content model. Start with a constrained editor and iterate.

Member Avatar for tgreer

Look at an application I helped to write. It uses a DHTML web front-end, and PostScript back-end for print production.

The site allows customers to build their own business cards. I could see you doing some of the same techniques for web layout generation.

The site is Swiss: http://www.monopoly.ch

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