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HTML PLAIN reference V1.1 Cyrille Artho Abstract: While HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language) is widely used due to its simplicity, it is not powerful enough to cope with the representation of complex content. It does not separate information from its representation, and offers no means to access metadata (information about pages). As a result of this, maintaining and updating large web pages is often a nightmare, either involving much manual work or the use of complex tools that try to glue an inconsistent set of documents together. By extending HTML, these problems can be solved in an elegant way. Customizable tags allow a better structuring, and variables decouple information from its appearance in documents. A preprocessor then generates a set of standard HTML pages based on this extra information and pages written in this new, higher level HTML. It also includes other powerful functions, such as file management and macros, which can automate many tedious tasks.   Contents List of Tables List of Figures 1. Introduction 1.1 Problems with HTML 1.2 Common tasks for webmasters 1.3 Approach to the problem 1.4 Notations used 1.5 Other HTML preprocessors 1.6 Where to obtain HTML PLAIN 2. Specification of the HTML extension 2.1 Customized HTML tags 2.2 Templates 2.3 Variables 2.4 The dictionary 2.5 Macros 2.6 Other replacements 2.7 ``Magic'' tags 2.8 Preprocessor directives 3. Parsing the documents 3.1 Why Perl? 3.2 Perl modules used 3.3 Parsing the template and variables 3.4 The document parser 3.5 Maintaining the file table 3.6 Checking for dependencies 3.7 Converting existing pages 4. The graphical user interface 4.1 Tcl/Tk 4.2 Tcl/Tk modules used 4.3 The configuration editor 4.4 The variable editor 4.5 The template editor 4.6 The demo program 4.7 Testing 5. Example and test pages 5.1 Using the programs 5.2 An example configuration 5.3 An example page 5.4 Writing the pages 5.5 Including latex2html output 5.6 Uploading 5.7 Converting existing HTML pages 5.8 Managing multiple sites 6. Summary and conclusions 6.1 Achievements 6.2 Remaining problems 6.3 Future enhancements 7. Test results 7.1 Example page 7.2 Other test pages 8. Changelogs 8.1 Perl programs 8.2 Tcl/Tk programs 9. Acknowledgements Bibliography Index About this document ... Back to HTML PLAIN reference V1.1