Easy way to "organize"/"render"/"generate" HTML?

Hi all,

I'm a relative newbie to web development. I know my HTML and CSS, and am getting involved with Ruby on Rails for some other projects, which has been daunting but very rewarding.

Basically I'm wondering if there's a language/backbone/program/solution to eliminate the copypasta trivialities of HTML, with some caveats. Currently my website is hosted on a school server and unfortunately can't use Rails. Being a newbie I also don't really know what other technologies are available to me (or even what those technologies might be). I'm essentially looking for a way to auto-insert all of my header/sidebar/footer/menu information, and when those need to be updated, the rest of the pages get updated. Right now, I have a sidebar that is a tree of all of the pages on my website. When I add a page, not only do I need to update the sidebar, I have to update it for every page in my domain. This is really inefficient and I'm wondering if there is a better way.

I imagine this is a pretty widespread problem, but searching Google turns up too many irrelevant links (design template websites, tutorials, etc.). I'd appreciate any help.

Oh, and I've heard of HAML as a way to render HTML; how would it be used in this situation?

Thanks Oli, this seems like the simplest solution (my site is very small). I have a problem with relative paths, though. It's best described here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1016917/should-i-use-relative-path-for-pages-within-the-site-or-it-doesnt-matter (the templating issue). Is there an easy way around this? I've tried using "link rel="/yaddayaddayadda" but that doesn't seem to work locally, which is a bummer. Or is it best practice to have _all_ of the .html files in the root folder...? Mine are within subfolders. Edit:Maybe create multiple includes, one per subfolder depth?

Rockmaninoff 2010-05-28 00:52:37

Not sure exactly what you're talking about. If you're doing `<link>` elements in the header (as your code suggests), you need to use `href` to point to the file. If you're talking about ``, I suggest you use virtual paths. These are "root-relative" to your URL so ` ` would always pull in the same file. The same applies for resource `<link>`s actually, root-relative will save you problems down the line.

Oli 2010-05-28 06:41:25

In short, all your references to other files, be they a ``, `<a>` or `<link>`, should probably use the whole root-relative path. There are exceptions where it's desirable not to do this but if you're having problems, now isn't one of those times.

Oli 2010-05-28 06:48:27

Thanks again. I've set up XAMPP and now have SSI working, and now my root-relative paths are all set up. The problem was that I was just trying to access my pages from my local directory structure on my PC, and that didn't like SSI.

Rockmaninoff 2010-05-28 15:13:06

Downvote if you will, I stand by my answer based on his criteria.

mVChr 2010-05-27 22:20:18

+1 - I wholeheartedly agree that recommending a CMS is the right thing to do. Be it Drupal (that's what I recommended), Joomla, EZpublish, Wordpress or other, it should give him the possibilities to overcome the difficulties he describes.

mingos 2010-05-27 22:27:03

ansaurus

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Easy way to "organize"/"render"/"generate" HTML?

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