[Scottish] HTML templating software?

[David Marsh's list-reading hat]

Hi Graeme,

On Mon, 2 Dec 2002 23:03:52 +0000
Graeme Mathieson <mathie+slug@wossname.org.uk> wrote:

> On Mon, Dec 02, 2002 at 10:53:13PM +0000, David Marsh's list-reading
> hat wrote:> 
> > I've been doing a bit of searching around of late to see if there
> > are useful Linux-based tools that I could use in order to help
> > writing the site, using 'templates' (ie, common themes for pages,
> > including basic layout, navigation bars, etc, such that I can change
> > the template and have the appearance of the whole site change in one
> > easy go).
> 
> Website Meta Lanuage:  http://thewml.org/
> 
> It rocks.  And it's what I use for my website.  OK, that's not exactly
> a glowing endorsement, but in the right hands, it can make pretty
> looking websites too. :-)

Yes, I've noticed WML. I have done a bit of searching around recently
and have tried to read up on what is out there.

(At this point I should probably mention that I have bookmarked what I
have found so far at: http://web.viewport.co.uk/temp/bookmarks.php#web
in case any of the links happen to be of any use to anybody else. Of
course, I haven't had time to read up on all of these to find out which
ones may or may not be of use..)

WML did look impressive, in my reading of its site, but unfortunately,
it also looks pretty complicated stuff, which initially steered me
towards looking for a simpler solution. However, maybe I should
investigate it again..


There seem to be two common themes with most of these preprocessors that
I have found:

* The documentation can be a bit variable. Despite being tools for
series of pages or entire sites, in many cases the documentation seems
to explain what to do for one file, but falls down when it comes to
multiple pages, leaving me unsure whether the program will do the Right
Thing if given *.type as an argument, or whether I need to write a
Makefile or shellscript to process everything (I'd rather avoid having
to maintain my own list of files to be processed)..

* Development on many of the earlier programs seems to have fizzled out
around 1998/1999. I'm wondering whether this is as a result of them
having evolved as far as their authors needed them to, or people
switching their site management to PHP and the like..

* (OK, there are three things) A surprising number of these seemingly
discontinued programs seem to have stopped at around version 0.4, but I
suppose that's the nature of this: people only develop code for as long
as they need to or feel interested in it.. ;-)


-- 
David Marsh, <email in header is valid>  | http://web.viewport.co.uk/