Characteristics

Overall philosophy : separation of the information and add of the design at the final stage.

I mentioned different expectations in the prior page. From those expectations, we drew the main characteristics of ManyPage

Original documents written in "plain" HTML (3.2)

The editorial staff (the one that brings text and pictures) have to be able to use any HTML word processor available on the market (except perhaps FrontPage cause this product doesn't really produce real HTML or at least not clean one). They need to be able to use most of the HTML possibilities without going too deep into technical development (Javascript...). It is a good advice to make them use HTML 3.2, with Tables and Images, or simple things like that.

Bilingualism and multilingualism

Even if it is of course possible to use ManyPage to manage a web site in only one language, it has been designed especially to help navigation between pages written in different languages.

One or more "dressing" template : different template for the same web page

Heavy graphical design sometime used in web sites is not always suitable to printing job. In the same way, depending on the bandwidth available, the websurfer could like to browse page without or with less images. Or as stated before, because of blind people accessibility, it could be useful to replace graphical menu with textual ones. ManyPage allows to maintain one page that will be duplicate once with the rich template and once whith the light one.

HTML Objects depending on the part of the web site

Most of the HTML objects (little part of HTML code that is used in the description of menus) that will be used in the web site are common to all the site and are defined at the root of the site. But each of those objects may be redefined in subdirectories of the web site.

Use of objects inside HTML pages

If we really want to to give a graphical look to the inside of a page, we may use some predefined objets such as horizontal bar, icon to illustrate a phone number and so one. One should have to put an HTML-like tag of the following sort : <MP.PHONE> and at compile time, this tag will be replaced by the adequate HTML code that will call an image (such as <IMG SRC="/Icon/phone.png"> for instance). It is possible to define Drag and Drop entities in Dreamweaver to insert such ManyPage Objects.

HTML optimisation

At compile time some HTML optimisations are done such as link relativisation and image size adding to the IMG tag.

A browsing tree

HTML pages have to be organized in directories in a way that is often different from the way we would like websurfers visit our site. ManyPage use information given in structure file to add navigational links like next and previous pages.