mksite.sh 2006-0428

mksite.sh is a static Web site / project HTML documentation formatter that only requires the Bourne shell and sed.
mksite.sh gives a common look and full navigation to an HTML Web site along with all the needed metadata detection, site map generation, and variable expansion.
It has a tabbed layout suitable for hundreds of Web pages, and is small enough to be added to any project tarball.
Pro
- It requires only sh/sed posix shell tools to build doc pages.
- It can build a common navigation bar and a sitemap for all webpages.
- The program is a single short script file freely copyable & modifiable.
Con
- All embedded meta-information must fit on a single line each.
- There is only little more functionality than variable substititions.
- The doc processing is slow - and even slower without gnu sed.
Neutral
- A sitefile must be written - the sitemap is not truly autodetected.
- The speedier twin perl script provides the exact same functionality.
- Best for small webpages but gets too slow for hundreds of webpages.
- The fancy results stem from the sitefile logic - see our examples .
Plus
- Automatic "printerstyle" page generation helping text-mode browsers.
- That style helps also for web accessibility of challenged people.
- Ships with fancy tabbed style navigation as shown on these webpages.
- Shortpage special style to print source code on full screen width.
- It can adapt hrefs to navigate web content pages in subdirectories.
Enhancements:
- A workaround was made for bugs in GNU sed.
- Pagelist detection was enhanced.
- The unit tests were corrected.