Building and Transforming Educational Web Sites with SATIRIC and Contextual Patterns

摘要

As faculty and institutions continue to adopt the World Wide Web for delivering course materials, they are encountering a host of related problems. Institutions must from everyone from novice users to faculty who want to go beyond the normal capabilities of HTML. Sites must often brand themselves with a uniform "look and feel" and also support easy updates to that look and feel. Sites must also support some form-based page generation. In this paper, we discuss SATIRIC (Site Authoring Tool Incorporating Regular Expression In Context), a pattern-based translation language developed to support these and other activities. We argue that a pattern language is an appropriate solution for many tasks. Novices can write text files and use preferred shorthands; the transformation language can turn those shorthands into HTML, XHTML, or XML. Experts can write new tags and define transformations from those tags. Institutions can define standard page templates and transformations that convert inputs to those templates. For a new look and feel, they can just change the templates.