Which services are already running?
Some possibilities:
IIS web server
Apache web server
ASP services (you mentioned server-side JavaScript)
PHP
CGI
Perl
Others???

What you can use depends on what you already have.

That said, you can use XML as a hierarchical database structure if you 
have some reasonable level of server-side code available.  If you can 
load in an XML library that supports XInclude, then you can even manage 
it as a relational-hierarchical system (which gets really neat for a 
simple CMS, especially if you build a really basic XLink setup for the 
navigation structure)

==Joseph++

P.S. your local-client idea sounds more like a web-design package than a 
CMS.  Alternatively you could always just setup a local machine with a 
false DNS to point to itself for the site you're building, run whatever 
CMS you prefer there, and just do a quick web-crawl of that to get your 
HTML pages and pipe them up to your real server...

Alan Dayley wrote:

>I am webmaster for a school band web site.  It is a hand-crafted piece of 
>beauty I inherited from the previous volunteer webmaster.  It uses HTML 
>with a few server side java scrips for header and footer stuff.  It looks 
>good but, after almost a year of doing maintainance, I am tired of doing 
>HTML by hand for every little change.
>
>The site is hosted on donated server space and donated bandwidth.  The 
>donated account they provided does not allow the site to use a DB.  That 
>would require the next expensive hosting package.  I'd rather not ask 
>them to donate more value if I can help it.  Unfortunately it is a 
>Windows host server too so even if they gave us a database, I wouldn't 
>know what CMS to use on a Windows web server.
>
>Is there a "CMS" system that will allow me to add new articles, post 
>pictures, in short, do basic site updates without adding to the services 
>of the web server?  I envision some application or "CMS" running on my 
>local machine that generates HTML to then upload to the server.
>
>I have not found such a thing but maybe one of you know of one.
>
>Alan
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