What is MKSITE.SH

MKSITE.SH is static website generator tool. It is best for small websites giving them a nice look and feel as per (a) costumized looks via css specials and (b) a nice feel through common navigation bar and (c) a sitemap index.

The custom look idea sprang out of the observation that it is not good to implant color and font information to the text, and not even set text-align inline. Instead one should reference a css definition. Standard html does only define two colors "foreground" and "background" but for navigation we want atleast two more for "shaded foreground" and "shaded background". So, we need to set those in one place and the regenerate the look for all pages from it.

Using an external css file makes for a dependency of the look of your webpage, and in fact some browsers can not even show a view if the css file unreachable. As would be for saved-as html page or a project page group that was moved to subdirectory of another website area. So, in fact we want the css definition inline to each html. A common "sitefile" allows for that.

Secondly, we want a navigation bar that references each page in a category/subcategory manner. For that we can use a "sitefile" as well containg all pages. This "sitefile" does even define the navigation order of next/prev/up, so none of the input htm files needs to remember that. The input htm files however contain the true (long) title and description whereas the "sitefile" only has a shorthand for navigation purpose.

When a website gets beyond a dozen pages we often see viewers to get lost in the navigation no matter how simple we did try to make it. The reason is in the "shorthand"s used on the navigation bar. That has made most experienced webdesigners to create an index and/or sitemap file additionally that lists all webpages along with their (long) description. As the counter effect we use even more rigid shorthands on the navigation bar now which makes for a lighter non-overloaded look of the navigation bar. So that people don't overlook the "FAQ" item.