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Written by Dennis Reinhardt
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Monday, 20 April 2009 14:54 |
Well, after nearly four months, the first Text Tool Kit app is up at http://www.HtmlPageIndex.com [update: site no longer active, link removed].  There is still plenty of code I plan to add but what is posted is ready.
The site posted has a JavaScript indenter and application downloads for a site cross-reference indexer. By indexing, I mean an index in the same sense that a book has an index: a alphabetic listing of the terms used pointing to the location where the term is used.
Since many html and CSS quantities are expressed as absolute quantities, HtmlPageIndex indexes constants as well. thus, if you used color #B07834 once in your html, and twice in your CSS file, you will see all three references to that color across the two files.
The toughest part of the entire project was not expected when I started writing: the need to break up the lines of JavaScript since some libraries had lines which were hundreds and thousands of characters long. More on that in a separate post.
The app posted is very much a first effort. It provides the same functionality to a web page that an index provides a book: an alphabetized listing of terms used. As presently constituted, HtmlPageIndex has no obvious advantage over search. Presently, if we wanted to find all uses of, say, color #B07834, from above, we would do a search. There is some work in setting up a multi-file search but within the capabilities of most users.
A static index can be easier to use than a search but ultimately, they provide the same kinds of answers.
Where an index comes into its own is in finding orphans: variables defined and never used, functions defined and not called, and files which do not need to be linked. Now you could go through the listing and find single definition variables and functions yourself. However, real web pages are huge and manually looking for ophans is tedious and mistake-prone. Another advantage is finding questionable items such as duplicate uses, case sensitivity, and possible mis-spellings.
Before I want to claim these as advantages of an index, I want to put in features to make searching for orphans and questionable items easier and faster. HtmlPageIndex should work well on small sites but will be getting additional features to make it more useful for large sites. Stay tuned.
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Last Updated on Wednesday, 12 May 2010 13:11 |
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