Web Paging - index

Any web site that attempts to go beyond the most trivial of web pages can soon become a maintenance nightmare. Especially, if your goals are consistency of interface and easy upgradeability. (See Dr. R.K.'s philosophy and pledge.)

I've chosen m4 and RCS as the primary tools to implement this design

• Working design document
• m4 command synopsis
• Helpful tips and hints on using m4
• m4 macros defined here for web page authoring
• Directory structure
• Auxillary files & scripts used to generate the website
• m4 Slides tutorial or slide collection
• Minimal distribution available for downloading

In this overview, a "website" represents a cohesive web entity, either maintained by a group or an individual, such that links within the website are under uniform control. Therefore, special emphasis is placed on links within the website. Links outside the website are treated like any other URL and suffer from the whims of whomever maintains that given web page.

The mechanism developed here is general enough that sub-websites can be maintained by several different groups forming a super-website that maintains the consistent interface through out all the web pages.

Others Who Have Had The Same Thought

Even though I came to the conclusion of using m4 to generate web pages independently back in early 1996, I am not the only one to do so. I list some of the other sites & people that have used m4 for this purpose.

• Peter Collinson's article in SunExpert February 1997 (pgs 26-33), "Automatic Web Page Creation". Only the title and related URLs are available. You need to get the article from the actual issue to read it. However, my synopsis is that he uses m4 and sed for minor string substitution. Not comprehensive.
• HTM4L - I wished I had thought of this name. I haven't looked at it in detail, but quite frankly it looks too primative to me and that it doesn't hide enough of the HTML mark-up. Also the author is asking $100 for it.