htmllib, cgi, HTMLfmt, genCGI, HTMLgen, html, Zope, ...

[Thomas Bryan]

Gerrit Holl wrote:

> I used HTMLgen and I don't really understand why to use it. If you don't
> know HTML, you can't use it: you need to understand tags like <B>, <I>, <U>
> and such. I strongly recommend to have a look at HTML:

If you know HTML, then you can use HTMLgen to help you maintain a 
consistent appearance from page to page on a web site.  In particular, 
many users find a consistent use of navigation aides (such as next page,
previous page, and home) to be very helpful.  It is also useful for 
helping multiple people working together to produce pages with a 
consistent appearance by using the same document base classes.
It also provides a nice abstraction for programatically generated
documents (for example, from CGI).  That way, you don't have to 
output raw HTML with print statements from your program.  Again, if
several CGI scripts should produce pages with a similar appearance, 
you can factor out the common parts into a class.  Then each program 
only needs to instantiate the class and fill in the extra information.

For a site of a dozen pages, HTMLgen is definitely unnecessary.
For a site of millions of pages, I think that HTMLgen would prove
insufficient.  For a site of a few hundred pages, I would probably
consider HTMLGen, especially if python scripts will be generating 
those pages (either as CGI scripts or as a cron job).  

As a bonus, it seems that it would be simple to use the HTMLgen
document classes to generate multiple formats.  I have been thinking
about writing output methods for LaTeX output. :)

-------------------------------------------
Tom Bryan
Applied Research Laboratories
University of Texas at Austin