Concert Reviews List Generation

I have a bunch of concert reviews on my Web site (you can find out why) that I had originally written in plain HTML (well, XHTML) because I was lazy and I thought that it would make my system more portable in the future.

This list grew, and as I am very lazy, I became tired of having to move an entry from a list to another, add new headers, links, etc. Moreover, I had a chronological list, and I wanted also a list by band name, and decided and it would be beyond the limit of the maintainability of this system.

That's why I decided to try and encode the list in XML and use XSLT to generate the XHTML pages.

How it works

I wrote a DTD and an XML schema to define the format of my list of reviews, then encoded the list of reviews in this format.

I then wrote two XSLT stylesheets generating a chronological list and an alphabetical list using this XML list.

Now, using an XSLT processor, I can generate those two listings after having edited the main XML file. I wrote a makefile which uses Xalan to do this.

Here are the results, the list of concerts sorted:

• by date
• by name

The resources

If you want to see how it is done, here is the list of files I use:

• The list of reviews in XML: concerts.xml and its DTD: concert-list-20001020.dtd and XML schema: concert-list-20001020.xsd.
• The XSLT stylesheets:
  • The stylesheets common to both output:
    • The header and footer of the pages: header-footer.xsl.
    • The piece of XSLT formatting a concert entry: format-concert-20001020.xsl.
  • The stylesheet for the chronologically ordered page: date-20001020.xsl.
  • The stylesheet for the alphabetically ordered page: name-20001020.xsl.
• The tools:
  • the makefile.
  • Xalan or any other XSLT processors.

The DTD, the XML schema and the stylesheets are copyright © 2000 Hugo Haas, and are hereby place in the public domain.

There are also older versions of those resources:

The very first one (from 9th October 2000)

• The DTD: concert-list.dtd.
• The stylesheets: date.xsl, name.xsl, format-concert.xsl.