The Essence of a Managed Web Site

Lets imagine that we are developing a new content management system or simply CMS. What shall we think of first?

» CMS should support all the interfaces stipulated in the technical specifications for the site construction
» CMS-powered web site should comply with general requirements to design, usability and information architecture.
» CMS should successfully run all tasks related to web site authoring.

However the task is getting more complicated when there is a family of web sites to maintain and support. Or if there are no technical specs available at all. Obviously, there should be some pattern for managing similar web sites. The problem is, that traditional API approaches do not fit here well. Every new web site needs to be different from others. The more significant the difference is the better. Accordingly, interface standardization of any kind seems to be a failure. Still, Red Graphic Systems can offer its intelligible solution, namely XML Sapiens.

XML Sapiens is a simple language for describing programming interfaces of CMS-powered web sites. XML Sapiens was designed by Red Graphic Systems in 2003 for Site SapiensTM, the corporate web area management platform. In 2004 Red Graphic Systems made it public on www.xmlsapiens.org. The concept of XML Sapiens is based on the three components necessary for creation of any web document:

» Content
» Presentation
» Functionality.

All of them are united with one object model, based on:

Query containers assign a document representation model in the data presentation template; they also report to the admin area how the data will be inquired from a user.

Static data containers support elements of code (HTML, XML, etc.) and retrieve this code in the data representation template.

Dynamic data containers cover a logically bound part of a web document, the content of which will be generated by CMS according to the special scenario. Dynamic data containers of XML

Sapiens allow to simply yet efficiently describe any functionality for the managed web site; and to create a new user interface quickly and easily.

So, XML Sapiens defines and unifies structure of CMS-powered web sites. Furthermore, it differentiates web site functionality from its presentation and content. Our project www.xmlsapiens.org seems to be the only service in the Internet that allows exchange of cross-platform functional solutions for CMS-powered web sites for developers and project managers.

The total volume of copy in the Web is shooting up each day. Hopefully, technologies like XML Sapiens will consolidate the efforts of CMS developers allowing to bring the content management under control.