Something new under the sun - XML-based web-content generation with Cocoon

With the ever-broadening acceptance of XML and XSL on the web, the multinational companies, publishers and content providers -libraries too! - intend to render contents designed for the web in ('global') formats of data structuring and archiving, such as XML. The highly flexible markup language XML is widely considered to be ideal for creating a variety of formats ((X)HTML, PDF, WML etc.) in a cost-effective manner, and the institutions can themselves decide which to choose for a particular aim. The application named Cocoon of the Apache Project is a probe into producing a system with such capabilities. Cocoon is actually a framework system that is capable of displaying on the world wide web the contents marked in XML by virtue of XML and XSL transformations. The forte of such web pages is that the style and the content are fully separated, which means that the layout of the information contents, the documents can be modified even on a daily basis and made to appear in ever new frames. At the same time, the job of the content creators is drastically reduced, since the 'primitive and simplistic features and limitations' of web-based content describing languages are removed far from them.