newbie: include navigation file without ssi?

[junkyard]

Hello,

I am new to html programming and have a question I hope someone can
help me with. I am working on a project to organize a lot of technical
information as a series of webpages. This information will ultimately
be distributed to users on a cd, and we don't want the users to have to
install anything, just bring up a browser and go to town.

My problem is that I have read about (and created) a navigation/menu
system using html and css. I would like the nav menu to appear at the
top of each page, yet have the source code appear in only one file, for
ease of maintenece. I read about using server side includes to
accomplish this, but will that work given that I need to ultimately
distribute this package on a cd without knowing what the user will have
installed on their machine (besides a browser)? if it is possible, how
would I go about setting it up?

If it's not possible, is there some other way to accomplish this?

thanks for your help!
mn

 

[Harlan Messinger]

Hello,

I am new to html programming and have a question I hope someone can
help me with. I am working on a project to organize a lot of technical
information as a series of webpages. This information will ultimately
be distributed to users on a cd, and we don't want the users to have to
install anything, just bring up a browser and go to town.

My problem is that I have read about (and created) a navigation/menu
system using html and css. I would like the nav menu to appear at the
top of each page, yet have the source code appear in only one file, for
ease of maintenece. I read about using server side includes to
accomplish this, but will that work given that I need to ultimately
distribute this package on a cd without knowing what the user will have
installed on their machine (besides a browser)? if it is possible, how
would I go about setting it up?

If it's not possible, is there some other way to accomplish this?

thanks for your help!
mn

One approach is global search and replace. For example, put the
following lines in each file:

---Begin Template 1 Here---
---End Template 1 Here---

and then use a tool like ReplacEm from http://www.orbit.org/replace/
that will let you insert code of your choice between two predefined
lines like the ones above, and later will let you replace whatever code
might have been between those lines previously with a new version. You
can run ReplacEm over a whole hierarchy of nested directories. It
provides several ways to save the previous versions in case you need to
revert.

 

[Harlan Messinger]

Harlan Messinger wrote:
[...]

and then use a tool like ReplacEm from http://www.orbit.org/replace/
that will let you insert code of your choice between two predefined
lines like the ones above, and later will let you replace whatever code
might have been between those lines previously with a new version. You
can run ReplacEm over a whole hierarchy of nested directories. It
provides several ways to save the previous versions in case you need to
revert.

Two things: (1) I meant to mention that ReplacEm is free. (2) The URL I
gave is legacy. The up-to-date URL is http://www.fitsoftware.com/.

 

[Andy Dingley]

My problem is that I have read about (and created) a navigation/menu
system using html and css. I would like the nav menu to appear at the
top of each page, yet have the source code appear in only one file, for
ease of maintenece. I read about using server side includes to
accomplish this, but will that work given that I need to ultimately
distribute this package on a cd

Two ways.

Do it with SSI. Burn it onto the CD by taking a copy via HTTP. Use any
"backup this web site to disk" program, such as the many Firefox
extensions.

Do it without SSI. Write your pages as SSI, then write/find a simple
Perl/Python script that does the equivalent to SSI by copying these
static pages to a new directory tree, merging in any SSI that they find.

 

[Paul Watt]

Hello,

I am new to html programming and have a question I hope someone can
help me with. I am working on a project to organize a lot of technical
information as a series of webpages. This information will ultimately
be distributed to users on a cd, and we don't want the users to have to
install anything, just bring up a browser and go to town.

My problem is that I have read about (and created) a navigation/menu
system using html and css. I would like the nav menu to appear at the
top of each page, yet have the source code appear in only one file, for
ease of maintenece. I read about using server side includes to
accomplish this, but will that work given that I need to ultimately
distribute this package on a cd without knowing what the user will have
installed on their machine (besides a browser)? if it is possible, how
would I go about setting it up?

If it's not possible, is there some other way to accomplish this?

thanks for your help!
mn

for ease you could always use a iframe, not pretty but it avoids scripting.
--
Cheers

Paul
le singe est dans l'arbre
http://www.paulwatt.info

 

[junkyard]

thanks for the suggestion, I checked it out and it will do what I need
it to.

thanks,
mn

Harlan Messinger wrote:
[...]

and then use a tool like ReplacEm from http://www.orbit.org/replace/
that will let you insert code of your choice between two predefined
lines like the ones above, and later will let you replace whatever code
might have been between those lines previously with a new version. You
can run ReplacEm over a whole hierarchy of nested directories. It
provides several ways to save the previous versions in case you need to
revert.

Two things: (1) I meant to mention that ReplacEm is free. (2) The URL I
gave is legacy. The up-to-date URL is http://www.fitsoftware.com/.

 

[junkyard]

Two ways.

Do it with SSI. Burn it onto the CD by taking a copy via HTTP. Use any
"backup this web site to disk" program, such as the many Firefox
extensions.

I'm not clear on how this works. Do you mean if I develop it on a
computer that has access to a web server (so I can use SSI) then do
"backup this web site to disk", the pages that get saved will have the
appropriate code (my nav menus) already included? That would work fine
for my purposes...

Do it without SSI. Write your pages as SSI, then write/find a simple
Perl/Python script that does the equivalent to SSI by copying these
static pages to a new directory tree, merging in any SSI that they find.

hmm, I do have a Perl interpreter installed already, so I will look for
a script to do this (didn't know there was such a beast...

thanks!
mn

 

[Jack]

I'm not clear on how this works. Do you mean if I develop it on a
computer that has access to a web server (so I can use SSI) then do
"backup this web site to disk", the pages that get saved will have
the appropriate code (my nav menus) already included? That would
work fine for my purposes...

I can only assume that's what Andy means; what he said is correct.

I was going to suggest shipping an autorun webserver on the disk, to
serve SSI HTML; but Andy's is a better way of doing it, so I remained
silent.

 

[Joe]

Hello,

I am new to html programming and have a question I hope someone can
help me with. I am working on a project to organize a lot of technical
information as a series of webpages. This information will ultimately
be distributed to users on a cd, and we don't want the users to have to
install anything, just bring up a browser and go to town.

My problem is that I have read about (and created) a navigation/menu
system using html and css. I would like the nav menu to appear at the
top of each page, yet have the source code appear in only one file, for
ease of maintenece. I read about using server side includes to
accomplish this, but will that work given that I need to ultimately
distribute this package on a cd without knowing what the user will have
installed on their machine (besides a browser)? if it is possible, how
would I go about setting it up?

If it's not possible, is there some other way to accomplish this?

thanks for your help!
mn

Google for "server2go".
It's a nice little app that you put on the CD. When you insert the CD,
Server2Go fires up, loads IE (unfortunately - instead of the machines
default) and everything works like it ought to.
I use it on a USB stick.

 

[Adrienne Boswell]

Gazing into my crystal ball I observed (e-mail address removed) writing in

Hello,

I am new to html programming and have a question I hope someone can
help me with. I am working on a project to organize a lot of technical
information as a series of webpages. This information will ultimately
be distributed to users on a cd, and we don't want the users to have to
install anything, just bring up a browser and go to town.

My problem is that I have read about (and created) a navigation/menu
system using html and css. I would like the nav menu to appear at the
top of each page, yet have the source code appear in only one file, for
ease of maintenece. I read about using server side includes to
accomplish this, but will that work given that I need to ultimately
distribute this package on a cd without knowing what the user will have
installed on their machine (besides a browser)? if it is possible, how
would I go about setting it up?

If it's not possible, is there some other way to accomplish this?

thanks for your help!
mn

1. You could use Server2go <http://www.server2go-web.de/> - a server that
can be put on a CD (I haven't tried it but I saw it in a thread here a
while back)
2. Use a preprocessor as others have suggested
3. Use frames - this is one of the few instances where frames might be
okay, especially since they can be resized, and the user probably isn't
going to be bookmarking.

 

[Joe]

Gazing into my crystal ball I observed (e-mail address removed) writing in


1. You could use Server2go <http://www.server2go-web.de/> - a server that
can be put on a CD (I haven't tried it but I saw it in a thread here a
while back)

yes, that's the one. I could NOT find the url when I suggested it
earlier. Thanks Adrienne.