I want to allow users to configure the theme while browsing my web-site(like Joomla uses templates), but it should not be just choosing from the templates I provide them, rather they should be able to choose the visual layout themselves. I think its called end-user-computing or programming by demonstration in research terminology. For this purpose I want to internally represent the suggested UI preferences the user provides in a XML definition. How can I do this? What technologies would allow me to reconfigure the web UI on the fly according to the way the user chooses it ?
A:
A way that would be very flexible is the following. You represent the contents of your site as XML that has no presentation properties (but does have navigation elements). Then you have preferences that you somehow translate into a XSLT stylesheet. You run this stylesheet over every content page and present the results (or get the browser to execute the XSLT for you if you so prefer).
Paul de Vrieze
2010-04-09 22:05:06