guidod - mksite features - printerfriendly = printer friendly version

|| - [ features ~ ] - ToDo -

|| - expandvars - updatevars - simplevars - attribvars - [ printerfriendly ] - sitemapstyle - filelist -

printerfriendly = printer friendly version

  <!--mksite:printerfriendly-->
  <a href="${printerfriendly:=site.htm}" title="printer friendly version">
  <img alt="printer / text mode version" width="8" height="8" border="0" /></a>

This is the recommended sitefile snippet to enable the mode that will generate a printerfriendly sister page for all pages also generated by the mksite.sh script from "*.htm" to "*.html". In this case it is actually generated from "*.htm" to "*.print.html". The stem extension for the sister pages can be set via the magic setting of course - the default is ".print" which is the same as choosing it explicitly with...

  <!--mksite:printerfriendly:.print-->

The actual inner mechanics will create a sister sitefile for the printerfriendly mode with the stem extension - if your sitefile was named "site.htm" (the default) then the printersitefile would be named "site.print.htm" (as per defaults). This printersitefile contains definitions for horizontal navigation bars created out of the information for the access tree as given in the original sitefile. Those horizontal bars reflect the sect/subsect relations in a way most usable form for very small screen sizes or even text mode browsers.

textmode-example.print.html

|| - project - [ features ] - examples - links -

|| - example - sitemaps - [ text mode version ] -

|| - WAI - SubSects -
lorem ipsum

Each line of the navigation block represents another level of the sect/subsect relation. To left of each line a little square (for an empty <img>) is shown. You can hover the mouse over these squares to get a "title=" popup as follows:

section: The first line represents the sections to categorize the following pages. The current section is highlighted by using square brackets around it - in the example above "[ features ]" is the current section.
- The button itself is hot with the hotlink only moving slightly down, a feature for the textmode representation.
topics: The second line is labelled "topics" and here should be some of the categorized pages that your website talks about. While most "section" pages have only an introductory text these will generally contain some interesting text about the "topic". The
- The button itself is hot with a hotlink pointing back to the original colored representation of this page. It is often the only link back to a colored representation.
pages: For smaller websites there will be no extra "pages" for a single topic. But in some cases it is better to break down a topic into multiple pages and bind them via the sitefile. The extra pages can be navigated via that third line.
- the current page/topic is hightlighted as well with square brackets. The lowest bracketted field has the href to the page currently viewed. If a current page has subtopic pages then the another navigation line is shown below with yet no page field in brackets.

Hence in the example "[text mode version]" has the href to the page currently viewed. That pages is categorized in the section "[ features ]" and it has two extension pages "WAI" and "SubSects" that can be jumped to. After the navigation block follows the page text.

For the page text to work, we have cleared out the complete <head>er from the original sitefile. There were only a few lines grepped out and taken over:

<title> line - containing the title prefix and $title variable
<head> line - to attach the generated "meta" tags to.
<link ref="short icon"> line - to maintain any browser shortcut icon that might be created for this website

The meta tags are automatically overwritten with a value as "isFormatOf" pointing to the graphical represenation made from the original sitefile. No provisions have yet been made to take over any "@print" css properties - therefore the page main content will be shown in the default browser style which we expect to be generally best for the device that the browser was created for - that may as well include a text mode browser like lynx, a graphical browser for a small screen like a PDA (personal digital assistant), a small screen text mode browser as for some mobile phones, or a special layout style for "visually impaired" possibly bound to a text-to-speach reader representation the page in a linear textual fashion.