HYpertext Monicsoft Net Shaper
hymn (him) n.
1. A song of praise or thanksgiving to God or a deity.
2. A song of praise or joy; a paean.
v. -hymned, hymning, hymns
-tr. to praise, glorify or worship in or as if in a hymn.
-intr. to sing hymns
The American Heritage Dictionary
HYMNS is the hypertext tool of the MONS (Monicsoft
Net Shaper) series; MONS is planned to be a complete Internet tool, allowing
easy access to all the useful protocols in use (and maybe more :); until then,
HYMNS speeds up the process of Web Area design and maintainance....
There are many HTML editors out there. Appeared as mushrooms after a spring
rain. After I tried some of them, I had taken my decision:
"Nobody in their right mind would abandon the flexibility and simplicity of
HTML for some menus, pop-up lists and interminable option-dialog-boxes." Why
are editors bad for me?
- They take me away from the code I'm writing (and they call it a FEATURE!
Yuck! It's like flying a plane from a remote!);
- They add code of their own, many times failing to clean it up;
- The code they put out is very badly organized - whenever one needs to add
something or debug, better start the page over;
- Many of them are difficult to update to keep up with new enhancements in
the HTML standards;
- Many don't handle applets or custom embeddings;
- Most are page-oriented; the few that help with site organization are
graphical memory-gobblers;
- and on, and on.... (and Ariston!)
Use HYMNS' walk-through to find many
editing actions that many expensive editors don't implement.
But! (in case you didn't notice, there are allways buts.)
Something NEEDS to be done to speed up and automatize certain tasks all too
well known to webmasters; it's quite difficult to create and maintain an
informative, good-looking and error-free site without making its pages look
like badly designed database forms. Such a tool needs to take into account the
following:
- Given the nature of the information interchange patterns, data requires
constant context-prompting: additional data that appears very often in a given
site: information context.
- Esthetic norms and different emphasis techniques gather even more luggage
on the individual pages: enhancement context.
- The tricks that many people invented to make net.surfing the addictive
occupation it is, add more to the context mentioned above: entertainment
context.
By the time a good-looking, error-proof site is put together, the actual
data it presents makes up an insignificant amount of the whole size of the
area.
- And then comes the most difficult part: maintainance! looking through text
piles of HTML code and applets settings to find the word that needs to be
changed, and that on large sites is a pain...
- changing some design element sitewide is another big problem;
- keeping track of the modifications made, and (in case a whole team is
making updates and improving design), of the tasks to be accomplished by each
member takes some more precious managerial time;
Nothing I mentioned up to here is new to a webmaster. Time to come up
with solutions, right?
Read this to see HYMNS'
solutions!
HYMNS takes the tediousness out of site development and gives a beginner WWW
publisher, as well as the most demanding webmaster a shortcut through the
development process.
- By defining "chunks" of layout and building them up into templates, there's
no more need to write the same code all over again; and if similar
chunks need to be created, the old ones can be reused as examples. Now
you can think about web-creation as a purely design-oriented process. Design a layout element and then
use it everywhere by just picking it from a list.
- You get complete inheritance for your data. If the chunk you just
included has new data fields, they get added automatically.
- All the good stuff doesn't take you away from the final arrangement of the
templates and you can delete any redundant code.
- The whole HYMNS interface is customizable (if you know
PERL); if it doesn't have the feature you crave for, go right at it and code it
in (you could also send me email to tell
me what you'd like added or what you added to my code);
- You get an automatic "To-Do" list to help you manage varying data; the
system notifies you by e-mail if you have to change something;
- With HYMNS, one CANNOT make links "in the air": no file - no link! Add a
false link - you are notified and, as one of the choices, a "dummy" file is
made and added to your "To-Do" list; delete a file - and you have to replace
it, or ALL the links to it are GONE!
- Deleted a file by mistake? Even with the many prompts and warnings? No
problemo: undelete is built right in, to spare you entering large data
files all over again!
- Pick colors, images and links from a full-featured file manager;
- Don't like the colors in the color palette? Fine, get the palette file in
Photoshop, add your own colors, then modify the imagemap of the palette to
include the values of your new colors;
- You can include new images at any time by adding them to the image
directory, or remotely, by using the included upload procedure.
- To help you start, HYMNS comes with layout "chunks" for every of the
latest HTML tags (at the moment of creation of the archive you got);
- Every time you add a new "chunk", it appears in the system's "chunk" list.
- Constantly changing data is conceptually separated from "context" data, so
you can save money by training different people to enter data in simple
forms (to create pages) and keep only one or two webmasters who know HTML,
JavaScript, CGI and other advanced Web layout technologies (to create the
templates)
- Make a modification in one chunk and the site is immediately
re-generated to show the modification on every page where that chunk
appears.
- Would you like to have different versions of the site (text version,
simpler layouts as well as the latest multimedia looks)? All the versions are
generated automatically every time you modify some data.
- Would you like to mirror your site? It's automatic, as long as the remote
site runs a configurable ftp server.
- All the versions, mirrored or not are generated from the same data! Your
versions will be instantly synchronized; and the storage space
needed for backups is much smaller.
- The whole system is secure. As secure as your web server makes it :)
- It fits everywhere on a sever. You can use it only for a sub-area
or on your whole site.
- Doesn't force you to redesign what you already have. It has an
automatic import mechanism that works on almost any already-developed
site allowing you to add in variables and chunks later, at your leisure and
without interrupting the activity of the site.
- If your server(s) are fast, you can use HYMNS as a dynamic area;
- HYMNS includes a mechanism that allows you to keep track of the traffic
your site sees: not only page counts, but really descriptive, user per page per
time combinations;
- All these goodies are bunched in ONE program. You already know how to use
Netscape, right? That's dramatically reduced training time, especially
for the people who do only data entry. Add to that maintainance time
brought down to almost nothing.
- Really, the only (useful) feature that HYMNS doesn't
implement and commercial editors do, is interfacing with an SQL
database. And I'm working on that right now.
Enjoy!
Walk-through tutorial
]===[ Download HYMNS
Examples of HYMNS at work: [BG-BIO]
[WARP]
[SESC]
[KCP]
[V-TOUR]