indexing
indexing is the process of generating an index.html file from
the contents of a directory. it is useful in situations where a
directory contains files intended to be accessible from the rest of
the website but for which no natural linkage exists (e.g., the
directory might be acting as an archive).
during indexing a parser reads the contents of each HTML file in
the directory to be cataloged and extracts information for the
index.html file. this information includes the document title (as
defined in the <title> element of <head>) along with a
sample of the body content (without the markup) known as the
digest.
when generating the index.html file the parser creates an
unordered list with one entry per HTML file. the title of each HTML
document is used within the anchor element of its entry to link to
the document and the digest is displayed to give an indication of
the content of the document. note: the parser will overwrite
any pre-existing index.html !
the parser uses entries in the rapple configuration file to
determine which directories are to be cataloged. these entries are
located within the <digest> element of the <generators>
and take the following form:
<dir title="My
Archive">path/to/indexed/directory/relative/to/website/root</dir>
where the value of the "title" attribute is used as the display
header for the generated index.html (it is placed in the document
title and used in a <h1> at the top of the file) and the
value of the <dir> is the absolute path to the directory to
be cataloged.
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