WebSitePP : HTML pre-processor

Why ?

It is rather simple to directly write the HTML code of a web page, or to build it with freewares like Netscape/Mozilla Composer.

This is getting boring when several pages must be written, especially with important redundancies (graphic chart, page structure, global menu, head and foot page...)

And it turns to nightmare when modifying or updating a common element in most pages. A simple oversight and the web site has a consistency loss.

It would be so nice to factorize common code and to be able to declare things like:
"Replace every tag  <FOOT_PAGE> , with the following texte <div align="right"> <small> Site updated on February the 31st, 2004 </small> </div> "
as pre-processors do with macro-instructions in some computer language (C for instance).

Context :

WebSitePP has been created for and while the development of this site, starting with the previous observation, still enforcing the following constraints:

• Simple : to know about HTML and the 10 WebSitePP commands is enough.
• Adaptable : it is compatible with Javascript, PHP...
• Efficient : Defined tags may be nested and do accept all kinds of string parameters.
• Evolving : Defined tags may be re-used, like in a library.
• Functional : Functions required to build a complete web site are available (multiple page handling, multi-language handling, links handling...)

Moreover, it checks for all broken links toward files (but not the 'http://' links).

Use :

WebSitePP is written in Python language (script), and generates HTML files from a web site description in augmented HTML. It is released under the GPL license.

Its use is :
  webSitePP.py [options] <site description file>

Options are:
  -prefix <name> Generated HTML file prefix (default='Site/')
  -suffix <name> Generated HTML file suffix (default='.html')