Reasons to start and to stop the LGSP

About the Reasons to Write the LGSP

Once upon a day my wife had decided to use the internet. And of course she needed her own website. At once she bought six or seven domains, because all these fine domains were very important for her actual work and for her future business. During the next six months my wife found some other important business domains. And however when a woman finds nice things she buys them ... and has a problem.

But wifes have also a built-in problemsolver, their husbands: My wife had many domains, but neither content nor any imaginations about the outfit of her new site(s). But she had a fine solution. One evening I had been told that I had to take a holiday: next easter we would go to france, rent a nice little house for two weeks. There we would elaborate her sites: she would say what she wants and I would realize her wishes. That wouldn't need more than one or two hours for one or two days. And the rest of the time we could do what also must be done: snuggling.

This plan wasn't a surprise. The only astonishing point was that easter would be there in three weeks. Ok. During my next french days I worked at the pages of my wife. Not only one or two hours and not only one or two days of course. But that also wasn't a surprise. We have created three full sites with a menu structure which respected all her wishes. Then we came home and she had to fill in the content.

Six months later she began starting her "fill-in-content-job". And of course at first she wanted to look at the pages of other peoples. That had a cruel consequence: Now she want's sites with a new outfit. Her own sites were so old that they must be modernized.

At this point I had a problem. We could play that game again and again. And I am really bad player... but a better dreamer: That, what would help, would be a machine, where my wife could insert all her wishes and which would realize those wishes automatically. For the moment let us start with those wishes which concern the structure and the outfit of her site. Such a machine would have to have a formular to enter the decisions on the one side. And on the other side it would have to have a machine which takes such a filled formular and generates all pages of the corresponding site automatically. And whenever my wife has to redecide something the machine should be able to rewrite the site.

Thinking about such a machine the idea of LGSP was born.

About the Reasons to Stop the Project LGSP

At least until the first years of the third millenium CSS (and javascript) was not really usable. To many browsers interpreted the CSS "commands" in to many different ways. Therefore many sites used tables, frames and html-tags like 'font' and so on for designing the outfit of their pages. And this is exactly the way lgsp does his job.

But now, during the last years, CSS has become stable in the sense, that the different browsers follow the definitions - more or less. And search machines don't like frame- and table based designs any more. Such pages are ranked worse. Therefore it is better to use opensource tools which operate on CSS and HTML.

While recognizing these facts I 'discovered' three tools and learned their handling:

1. TYPO3, a very well elaborated Content Management System which gerates clear html code
2. YAML = Yet Another Multicolumn Layout and (X)HTML/CSS framework, which has already integrated all the different CSS browser handlings and which has been documented in an extraordinarily fine way
3. The corresponding YAML-TYPO3 Template by t3net.de which connects both methods

Now I myself have migrated my own site from LGSP-handling to YAML. And if the author himself means that his application is in a special way a outdated he should not no longer generally recommend it as general solution. Therefore I have closed the lgsp-project since the end of 2007