Weave updated

I do not suppose anybody makes web sites by hand anymore. For those who do, an updated version of Weave is available here .

Weave has been around for well over a decade and the basic ideas remain the same. It is a way of writing scripts to produce web pages more economically than typing in the HTML by hand. When the first version came out the browser wars were still raging and Weave implemented masses of tags. Since then CSS has brought greater flexibility and the plethora of tags has been rendered unnecessary.

The new version only requires the Shared C library. It reads in Weave source scripts to a graph structure in memory, checks that there are no cycles, and writes out the resulting tree, whose leaves are strings, to the output file. Because data shuffling is kept to a minimum it is a fast way of producing output text.

I do not suppose anybody makes web sites by hand anymore. […] more economically than typing in the HTML by hand.

My blog (and any other random page) is written by hand in Notepad++. The blog uses some php to build the page with generic preamble and tail content (the title, the right-side navibar, etc) with the entry content pasted into the middle. However, that content, it’s all written by hand. It’s slow and can be tedious if there’s a lot of markup necessary, but I have tried a number of tools but not a single one gave a result that didn’t suck.

My criteria for sucking, by the way, is that it must look on NetSurf more or less the same as it looks on a PC or my iPad. Most fail the NetSurf test. Then, that said, I have seen some automatically generated content that was absolutely sickening. http://www.heyrick.co.uk/frobnicate/ is a good example. The markup is… just bad. And the program was crashy. Plain text editors don’t tend to crash for arbitrary reasons. :-)

I have been using Weave for 99% of my own websites since the turn of the century – and lots of others too. What I found really useful was the ability to keep databases in labelled record form and then automate the process of displaying information from them on webpages. A big job was the 2006 International Congress of Byzantine Studies, which met in London. This involved displaying two websites, one in English, one in French, with schedules of talks, text in Greek and Russian, links to tourist and transport information for the participants, etc. My least successful have been for small businesses, because those commissioning them keep changing their minds and want the site to look businesslike , i.e. a jumble of bells and whistles. For some years I did our Parish Council’s website. Parishes being the lowest tier of government in England, this had to satisfy a changing set of rules about accessibility, freedom of information, promises not to abuse nonexistent cookies, and be hosted on government approved ISPs. In the intervening years businesses have sprung up providing specialised websites, for Parishes, schools, for artists wanting to show their wares and so on. They can do a better job than amateurs like myself, though I fear they often cram in totally unnecessary Javascript and make their sites slow to load because they fetch CSS, pictures, advertising and sponsors’ foofaraw from every corner of the globe. I am getting too old to bother now, but it was interesting.

because those commissioning them keep changing their minds

Yup. Been there, done that, got the T-shirt.

What I did for a while when I did websites was to discuss what the “client” wanted, document it, and then get them to sign off on that. Any deviation from that would mean recreating the specification which meant €€ and suddenly you get messed around a lot less.

In the end, I decided the simplest approach would be, simply, “sorry, but I’m busy”, and let somebody else deal with the hassles.