Development tools and platform availability

Before going deeper into details, here are the tools used to develop ManyPage

Perl, perl, perl > 5.0

The main thing is that ManyPage has been fully developed in the Perl language available on all Unix platforms.

Under Unix SGI, MacOS X (server and client) and Linux

ManyPage should be able to run on any good unix with a recent perl package installed. It has been successfully used on SGI Unix, MacOSX (server and client) and Linux.

We did not port it to the classical Mac OS, because Mac OS is from now a real BSD unix (Mac OS X). We did not port it to windows platform because real webmasters do not use windows :-).

More honestly, we didn't port it to those platforms because the path of the files are not managed in the same way, and as we didn't need to use it on those platforms we didn't want to bother with them.

SGML/XML like description of objects

The idea of the format of the files that describe the design of the produced web page came from SGML, but it is neither real SGML nor XML

example of an object :

<MP.MENU1.A>
   <MP.MENU1.SEP.LEFT>
   <a href="/web/index.+" 
   onMouseOver="window.status='<MP.MENU1.A.ONMOUSETEXT>'; 
   return true"><MP.MENU1.LEFT.FONT><MP.MENU1.A.TEXT><MP.MENU1.RIGHT.FONT></A>
   <MP.MENU1.SEP.RIGHT> 
 		  </MP.MENU1.A>

From this example, one can guess :

The beginning of one object definition : the tag <MP.MENU1.A> . Each object defined by the webmaster to be used by ManyPage should begin with "MP."

The end of this object definition : the tag </MP.MENU1.A>. Each object definition has a beginning and an end.

Some objects can be used inside the definition of another object. At the running time, each object is replaced recursively by its definition.