HTML Static Macros

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Introduction

<!-- macro Measure 20 cm -->

<!-- macro JDisplay Measure 20 cm -->
<!-- generated -->
<span class="metric">20 cm</span>
<span class="imperial">(7.87 in)</span>
<!-- /generated by Measure -->

Advantages of HTML Static Macros

• If you change your mind about any aspect of how your website should look, you need change it in only one place, and magically everything changes to fit your new rules.
• It is not just a matter of including standard text, though you can do that too with <!-- macro Include You have standard patterns, which expand in theme and variations limited only by your imagination. In my mind, this is most important advantage. Many such schemes limit you to some clumsy toy language to implement your macros. When it comes to doing something difficult you are stuck in its box. With HTML static macros, you have the full power of Java to implement your macro expansions. You don’t have to learn yet another goofy language/syntax. If you know Java, you are ready to go.
• You don’t need to learn complicated JSP or taglib syntax for your macros.
• You can run your website without spending any money at all. There are many places that will host a vanilla website for free. You have to pay for one with server-side ability. You don’t need to pay an ISP to give you database, JSP, Servetets etc. You can serve your website from plain static server than just hands out pre-prepared HTML.
• Since there is no server-side overhead, your visitors will receive the web pages they ask for more quickly.
• The scheme is Google-friendly, encouraging Google to spider your entire website, and keep its indexes up to date.
• Since you write the macros themselves in ordinary Java, they can be infinitely clever. You can compute, look in files, check if images exist, look things up in databases, so out looking on the web for information, dynamically load code etc. etc. anything Java can do, an HTML static macro can do. It is just a Java class that implements the Macro interface and its expandMacro method.
• All source code is provided. It is fairly straight forward compared with server-side code.
• You don’t need to learn a new language. You code in ordinary Java.
• You have extreme flexibility in devising what your macro commands look like. You can make them as terse as you please, with clever defaults, keyword, positional optional, variable numbers of arguments.
• If you make a mistake, your code can’t crash the server, or harm any other customers of your ISP. You don’t upload anything for the public until you are satisfied it is as you wanted it. If it does go off the rails, the public will never know. It is a more pedestrian, safer way of operating, that does not require the same degree of coding skill. You get to see the results before anyone else does. Nobody else sees anything until you verify the results are ok. With JSP you never know for certain what gibberish the fool thing will serve as your web page under extreme circumstances when you are not looking.
• The code is pretty solid. Though it was first released to the public 2008-07-26, it has been used in production and polished since 1996.

Disadvantages of HTML Static Macros

• You need basic Java programming skills. You need to know how to write simple Java code, how to compile it, how to tweak ANT scripts, write batch scripts. This skill is just presumed.
• You can’t interact with your users and generate different pages depending on their input (other than via Applets). All pages have to be prepared ahead of time.
• So far, nobody but me, Roedy, uses this scheme, so won’t be able to get help on newsgroups.
• This is not a package in the usual sense. It is a very large custom application I wrote for my own use. You modify or cannibalise it to create your own custom application. Just how much work it will require to whip it into shape for your own website depend on how different your website is from mine, mindprod.com. It contains a great deal of code you will probably find irrelevant. There is no clean separation between code everybody uses and your own custom code, though I have been working over the past weeks to make that separation ever cleaner. You will need to do a fair bit of butchering existing macros or writing new ones before it generates code suitable for you own website. If you wanted to copy the style and layout of my website slavishly, all you would need to do is modify the Configure. java file to change all the constants that refer to mindprod.com to refer to your website. However, you probably also want a different overall look, at least a different colour scheme. That would require changing the master style sheet, and changing some of the Java code that lays out the pages. Perhaps, to start, you could ape my layouts, then over time gradually morph them into something more to your liking.

  This also means you can’t, in a perfectly straightforward way, slip new versions of HTML static macros into yours the way you could with JSP. To make that update/merging process easier, when you modify code, create new replacement classes with new names and discard the old, rather than simply modifying code. Over the coming months I will work to split the code more cleanly in two, the stuff peculiar to my website and the code of general interest. That will make it easier for you to ignore my specific code and to incorporate revisions in the general purpose code into your own application.

• There is not much documentation. You pretty well have to study the Java source, and study my website mindprod.com and the HTML (downloadable via the Replicator), to see how the macro commands work and what they expand to. The source is fairly well commented.

How to Proceed

1. Download the HTML static macros package. It comes bundled with various auxiliary packages also downloadable separately.
2. Look at various pages on the mindprod.com website with your browser and view source to see the macros and how they expand. Study the source code. Use the Replicator to get yourself a local up-to-date copy of my entire website for easier study.
3. Study the source code for a simple macro such as Photo. java.
4. Install ANT, and try compiling the code, and using it to expand the macros on my website. If you don’t use the Jet native compiler, strip out the references to Jet in the ANT and BAT files.
5. Make a copy of the source code, and modify com.mindprod.htmlmacros. Configure.java. Leaving alone anything you don’t understand, for now.
6. Throw away any macros you are fairly sure you will never use, or will never want to cannibalise. You can always get a fresh copy from my website. Write you own simple macro and try it out.
7. You can do quite a bit to change the look and feel of the generated code just by modifying the style sheet mindprod.css, without changing any macros at all.
8. Focus on getting your various header and footer macros going. Mine are pretty complicated with two kinds of Google AdSense ads, rotating public service ads, bread crumbs, and indexes. Here are three approaches.
   1. You can write your own header and footer macros from scratch, cannibalising bits from mine.
   2. You can take mine and strip out parts you definitely don’t want, leaving the parts you don’t understand yet intact.
   3. You can hire me to write custom macros to your specifications for you.
   For this work, you might find the quoter amanuensis very useful. You can feed it finished sample HTML from your existing website and it will convert it into Java String literals that you can embed in your header and footer macros, then add the variable and calculated bits to it.
9. Strip out whatever you don’t immediately need. You can always add it back later.
10. Just keep gradually improving your macros, and making your code more and more modular — encapsulate. Don’t clone! It is your code now. You can change anything you like.

How It Works

Existing Macros

Costs

	Please email your feedback for publication, errors, omissions, broken/redirected link reports and suggestions to improve this page to Roedy Green :
	Canadian Mind Products
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