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» StaticXSLT

…is the XSLT based static site generation framework especially developed to generate this website.

Its MIT licensed source code is available on both Github and cgit.

The implementation of a pure¹ XSLT solution to the problem of static site generation required the development of a collection of external functions enabling access to the filesystem, external applications and other transformations from inside XSLT. These external functions are not part of this project and were developed separately as InputXSLT. Additionally a basic XSLT build system was developed to make StaticXSLT usable for different projects which is available as BuildXSLT.

The prime example of how this framework may be used in practice is the implementation of my blog.

Overview

The implementation of the static site generator is contained within the src/steps directory of the linked repository and consists of four XSL transformations that all form a link in the generation chain module executed by BuildXSLT.

These transformations traverse the given source directory, plan tasks² to be executed, process those tasks and summarize the result for the user.

common:~# ixslt --input make.xml --transformation ../BuildXSLT/build.xsl
Tasks processed:  19
Tasks successful: 19
▶ Generation successful.
common:~#

The first of these transformations list.xsl traverses and lists a source directory containing various levels depicting the different stages of the actual static site generation process as a base for all further processing.

Based on the results of the list.xsl transformation the next transformation plan.xsl schedules a number of different tasks to be processed by process.xsl. Examples for these tasks are cleaning a target directory, linking files and folders and of course generating transformation stylesheets contained within the various levels of the source tree.

After the various tasks are processed by process.xsl the results of all tasks are summarized by summarize.xsl to provide the user with a easy to read plain-text output.

Levels

A level is simply a folder within a given source directory which may in turn contain a arbitrary number of transformations and source documents inside subfolders. All transformations within these levels are processed by the StaticXSLT transformation chain which handles datasource dependency resolution and preserves the correct result path context. Levels are processed according to their alphabetic order. Subfolders of level directories that do not contain any XSLT stylesheets and non-stylesheet files are automatically symlinked to their appropriate target directory.

Data Source and target resolution

Every transformation contained in one of the levels contains a meta variable defining the required data sources and target paths. This information is read during task processing by the process.xsl transformation and used to provide each transformation with the data sources it requires and write the output to the path it desires. This definition of requirements and targets directly inside each transformation is an essential part of how this static site generation concept works.

The system currently provides a couple of different data source reading modes such as full for reading a complete XML file as input, iterate for iterating the second-level elements of a given XML source and expression for evaluating a arbitrary XPath expression against a given XML file. Target modes include plain for writing a the result into a given file at the appropriate target level and xpath for evaluating a XPath expression to generate the target path. This XPath evaluation functionality in combination with the iterate data source mode is especially helpful in situations where one wants to generate multiple output files from a single transformation such as when generating article pages or the pages of the article stream.

Differentiation and limitations

This approach to static site generation is novel in the manner that it is the only publicly available XSLT based solution to this problem domain that I am aware of, which uses XSLT as both the application and template language. I extended XSLT with InputXSLT and developed this static site generation in the attempt of producing something as flexible as Symphony CMS that generates static output.

The current implementation of the concept described on this page is limited in the sense that it doesn’t support incremental regeneration but generates the whole website from scratch on each run. While this problem should also be solvable in pure XSLT, I currently do not plan on solving it as it is fast enough for my current use cases and largely depends on the speed of the used Markdown processor and syntax highlighter anyway.