Generate HTML pages from some template

Question

I have an open-source project for which I have to generate HTML pages to put on the web. I wanted to keep everything as simple HTML pages. The problem with this approach is if I need to change the design, I have to goto all the pages and change it. This will be tough as I have lot of pages.

Is there some kind of HTML generators which can process simple annotated text files? This way, I can maintain the documentation and website contents as plain text files and run it through this program to generate static HTML pages. This also helps in keeping the design consistent.

Any help would be great!

Answer 1

All of the "lightweight" markup languages work well for this.

Markdown http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/

ReStructuredText (RST) http://docutils.sourceforge.net/rst.html

There are others. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightweight_markup_language

I'm a fan of RST.

rst2html.py somefile.rst >somefile.html

Answer 2

This tool was created for python, but I believe can be used for other projects too. Django uses it. http://sphinx.pocoo.org/

Answer 3

With docbook you can have your content as a set of XML files then compile it into HTML, PDF, or whatever - many filters exist.

Here is some XML http://elastik.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/elastik/book/

Here is the docs http://book.elastik.jarofgreen.co.uk/

Answer 4

I used a similar approach for status pages that I wanted 100% pure HTML.

If you have no restriction on the machine that can generate the pages, I suggest you to use any popular scripting language you know, like PHP.

In my case, I simply maintained ASP.NET pages in a local project, but the output was the generated HTML pages. For that I used ApplicationHost. Here is an example (input is the path to an ASPX page):

    public static string GenerateToHtml(string input)
    {
        string template = Path.Combine(Path.GetDirectoryName(Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly().Location), "Host\\input.aspx");

        File.Copy(input, template, true);

        VirtualHost host = (VirtualHost)ApplicationHost.CreateApplicationHost(
                                                       typeof(VirtualHost),
                                                       "/Host",
                                                       Path.GetDirectoryName(template));

        // We must get with the filename only. If we use a full path we get a Bad Request
        string content = host.GetContent(Path.GetFileName(template), string.Empty);
        File.Delete(template);
        return content;
    }

Answer 5

All recent versions of MS Word will Save As a web page (.html or .html). I just checked on the oldest version I have (Word 2002) and it is available.

I believe the same option exists in Open Office, although I don't have it currently installed.