Please read the License Agreement before using this program. By using the program, you have implicitly agreed to abide by these terms.
| User's Guide | Reference Guide |
The HTML Programmer's Extension, htmlPX, is a simple command-line HTML preprocessor that can be used to build websites from template files. The template files and other, auxilliary files, are combined by htmlPX to produce HTML files that can be uploaded to a website.
htmlPX is designed to allow someone who is well-versed with HTML to quickly build template files and code library files with a simple text editor. A wide variety of HTML editors can also be used to create these files. These files are then combined based on a site file, which is a set of directives to htmlPX, to create an entire website. This process is referred to as compiling or generating. The advantages of using htmlPX over straight, hand-coded HTML files are:
I started building htmlPX because I needed a tool to build my own websites and I couldn't find a free tool that was as powerful and as easy to learn and use as I needed. I hope you take a few moments to learn how to use htmlPX. I believe it will be well worth the investment in time you give. The 30 minutes it takes you to learn to use this tool will be paid back many times over in productivity improvements. I hope htmlPX makes you more productive and makes building your websites easier and more fun.
htmlPX was originally developed as an exercise to learn the Java programming language. It is written completely in Java using JDK 1.1.5 and therefore requires a Java 1.1 Virtual Machine (JVM) to run. It was tested under Windows 95 and Windows NT 4.0 with both Sun's JVM (java.exe) and Microsoft's JVM (jview.exe). It should run on Windows 98, OS/2, UNIX, Linux and Macintosh as well, but it has not been tested. I would be excited to hear of any non-Windows operating systems that it is used on.
If you do not have a JVM, you can get Sun's runtime environment free. Download the JRE from http://java.sun.com/products/jdk/1.1/jre/index.html.
The actual Java classes that are needed to run htmlPX are located in the htpxs1_0.jar file. This file is the only one that is really needed to run htmlPX. Installation involves unzipping the downloaded file htpxs1_0.zip into a directory. This directory will be called the program directory.
For Windows use, a batch file named htmlpx.bat is included in the installation file. This file can be used to
actually run htmlPX. You will need to modify htmlpx.bat so that the line
java -classpath c:\pgm\htmlpx\htpxs1_0.jar;%CLASSPATH% htmlpx %1 %2 %3 %4 %5 %6 %7 %8 %9
will contain your program directory instead of c:\pgm\htmlpx. Notice that the jar file name
is included in the directory specification. Java needs the entire file name to find the classes in a compressed
archive.
You can modify the batch file to use jview from Microsoft if you wish to. It could be modified to use whichever JVM you prefer.
After modifying the htmlpx.bat file, you should copy it into a directory that is located in your path. Once this
has been correctly done, you can execute htmlPX with a command such as:
htmlpx my.sf
where my.sf is your site file. (More on that later.)
For other operating systems you will need to create your own shell scripts or whatever to execute htmlPX in your environment. If you have problems with this, please feel free to contact me at htmlpx@wiserve.com and I will try to help you determine how to run it on your system.
The following documentation files will guide you through using htmlPX.
| User's Guide | A quick tutorial and a basic user's guide | |
| Reference Guide | A detailed reference to all htmlPX directives |
If you have questions or comments about htmlPX, please email me at htmlpx@wiserve.com. Since this is free software, I cannot promise to fix the problem, but I will certainly try. I want you to be successful and tell all of your friends. I might even want you to buy an improved version of htmlPX at some future time.
You can also visit the htmlPX webpage at http://www.wiserve.com/htmlpx.