The ZenSoft web site starts life as a single XML document. This single document contains all of the content that you see on the site. The XML document is translated into HTML 4.01 Strict documents via complex XSLT stylesheets. These generate the individual pages and add elements such as the synchronized navigation tree, the menus, internal hyperlinks, and so forth. This translation was originally done with Xalan-Java, but it proved unncessarily slow. We now use MS-XSL, which is around ten times faster. The result of this process is hundreds of fresh HTML files. Finally, we use a CSS2 document to describe the colors, sizes, fonts, etc., for the pages, rather than having that information stored in the HTML documents. The entire conversion process from XML to HTML is nearly instantaneous (around 100 pages per second), which makes it easy for the site to be updated and modified—even in significant ways—at any time. By completely separating the content from the form that content takes, this is a significant improvement over previous technologies, such as creating web sites directly in HTML by hand or with creation tools. It also eliminates the need for complex processing on the web server itself. Our online store is a custom-written PHP application with a MySQL backend. All pages validate error free as HTML 4.01 Strict and CSS2. The links at the bottom-right of each page allow you to verify this validation. Because of our strict adherence to these standards, our web site is compatible with any web browser that also adheres to the standards. We recommend Mozilla Firefox:  The content of our site is served with the Apache HTTP Server. The server has been configured to detect whether or not the client’s web browser supports integral gzip decompression, and automatically serves compressed content if so. This reduces the bandwidth needed for HTML files by more than 60%, allowing fast load times even over slow connections. Our primary server is located at Hurricane Electric in San Jose, California. We have additional servers in Orem, Utah and Madison, Wisconsin. If you have comments or questions about our web site, please contact us. | ||||
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