Why does MKSITE.SH exist

I have experiences with a lot of doc generator tools. Most of the sophisticated generator tools need to pre-installed in a system in order to let your project get documentation. Package do not like that atleast, and its only acceptable for them if it is a very common package also used in a lot of other projects. The counter effect is that they are not very flexible, you can not easily add your own stuff, and mostly those third party packages have yet other dependencies that you can not tell to those who want to install your package from source.

In the end I came to the conclusion to not like to have a third party dependency for simple html documentation. In most cases that is just acceptable. In order to allow for a pleasant web site layout, I did start to separate a navigation bar as an html snippet and the real documentation files each in separate pages, and using simple sed scripts to combine these into the final pages (per makefile rule) Be assured that it did turn out to be sufficient for all the plain documentation of a project.

The only problem had been that it is only good for rather small documentation sites that can be limited to a static navigation bar. Each direct item is listed in the nav bar, and most other parts won't get a nav bar at all as the resulting navigation is not easy and does not have a professional look with feedback and nav buttons to click as next and back and up.

Furthermore and over time some of my "small" website had grown out of the dozen pages so that the navigation bar grew longer and longer to a point that the eye got lost. For some of the projects I got email question that were clearly answered in the online FAQ or atleast webpage documentation specifically taylored to the topic. So there was more and more a pressure to sectionize the website into categories which should stand out prominently for any use coming across.

That can be done with simple sed script as well but it did turn out to be another file to maintain properly, and obviously sed syntax is error prone in this respect. So the correct way is to generate the "sed" script from the navigation bar itself. With all the information available, it was also possible to generate a sitemap automatically - and that's where the project got its name from.

So after all the mksite.sh project is a simple static website generator that can handle 100+ pages and group them into categories using meta information to do somewhat more than just a `cat site.htm page.htm > page.html` where it did all start from. And it only requires a bourne shell and grep/sed which comes with any posix'ish operating sytem in the world.