Name for the concept of placing the contents of a
whole website into a single file and serving it
directly from there.
By [Neil Madden].

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He, Neil, already uses something near to this for his
personal website, based on [Metakit] and [tDOM]. I.e.
he stores XML and converts that to HTML. This is currently
done offline. The moment this is changed to online
generation the StarSite is complete.

Related to this is a notion by [BrowseX]. This browser
allows the retrieval of a website and its storage into a
zip-archive. This is usually meant for easy transfer of
a website, but also allow display of the archive via
BrowseX, without unpacking it (IIRC [AK]).

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''Obvious'' extensions of the concept.

   * A ''local mode'', i.e. running the Starkit containing the StarSite, or providing access to it, in a non-web environment pops up a Tk based display which allows browsing the site without web-browser.

   * An extension of such a local mode would be to enable the editing of pages in the site.

   * Allow the starkit to run not only as [cgi]-type application, but as its own web server.

Depending on the exact nature of how web pages are stored in
the StarSite this can have significant overlap with the code
base providing the Tcl'ers Wiki. Especially as some discussed
extensions to it would allow the storage of not only Wiki markup,
but other types of data as well, like images, HTML, or XML. The
similarity should be clear by now.

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[NEM] - Excellent summary. This is exactly what I was planning. My main interest was in XML/XSLT generation of content, but really anything should be possible. The StarSite would sit on the server, and intercept requests using the PATH_TRANSLATED variable. So, for instance, in my website currently, the script xml.cgi can be invoked like http://www.tallniel.co.uk/cgi-bin/xml.cgi/home.xml which grabs the home.xml file and applies necessary stylesheets to it. Likewise, images could also be requested and returned from the database. The fact that MetaKit is the backend, allows for sophisticated searching and user interface options (session management, personalisation etc). Mirroring a site would be a case of copying one, highly-compressed MetaKit datafile. I find this concept quite exciting.

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[Category Internet]