Welcome Boyz and Girls to the Non-Official Shit-Reduction Program
(Novi Sad, "Me, Myself, All Over Again")

Introduction

Motivation

If you read this, it's quite likely that you tried to design a html page. And you probably found out that html is a very clumsy thing: No macros, no include files and several other features lacking.

And what can you do after your page is ready? View it with a browser and test-click all links? Pfuahahaha! Most browser are designed to handle as many errors as possible and display a readable page, but don't mention your errors! And link-testing is a very stupid task...

Of course, there are several tools around: You can use a C-preprocessor to define macros and include files, use some of the various html validators, replace your special characters with recode and run a link-test-tool on your page.

So, after installing several Tools (and compilers and interpreters), you are ready to go... and can start five programs after a simple change to one of your pages.

(Note: People who use the C-Preprocessor are easy to identify by the silly date format of __DATE__: who writes Feb 23 1995 on purpose?)

What it is

hsc tries to summarize the functionality of all these tools in one program: it performs a (small) syntax check, tests your (local) links, replaces special characters by their entities and provides a quite html-like way to define macros.

It also supports several features you probably won't find in most other tools, like absolute URIs, stripping useless white-spaces and automatically setting the size-attributes for images. For complex projects, a project-file can be maintained and a dependency generator helps you keeping your Makefile up-to-date.

How it works

hsc simply acts as a preprocessor: You give it an "extended" html-source (later in this document refered as "hsc source") containing special commands, and hsc interprets it and produces a pure html-output as object file. This output-file can be viewed with your w3-browser.

Normally I write my hsc sources using a simple text-editor, maintain them in a Makefile and process them with hsc. From my point of view, this is the recommend way of using this tool.

What it isn't

Obviously, there is no fancy gui, no (pseudo-)WYSIWYG, no drag & drop - there are other programs which provide these functionalities. But a common lack of these programs usually is that they give less support for large projects and are limited in configurability.

If you just want to create your own personal homepage, write a short html document with information about your three selfwritten freeware-proggies, include a picture of your cat, send greets to Sepp and Hugo or something like that, there are probably other tools which are easier to handle and will serve your needs well. But of course, I can't prevent you from using hsc for these tasks, too.