HTML Document Conversion: Converter Development

Things to Think About...

A Text to HTML converter should be very general at first. It should be able to change any text into an HTML document. Then, for each specific task, it should be tweaked to suit the particular needs and goals of that task.

The converter should first gather all the information it needs about the file name, Title, Header, Links, etc. This can be programmed into the converter, entered by a user, or read from a file.

The converter then needs to write the standard HTML header, including the Title.

Next should be the Body tags and the Document Identifiers ( < h1 > and < h2 > )

Then the body of the document (the actual ASCII text) should be inserted. If necessary, text-strings should be automatically searched for and modified (such as illegal characters and abbreviated character tags).

Closing remarks should be made (Date Last Modified or Author)

Navigation Buttons are added last.

Close the BODY and HTML tags.

Developing a shell-script, batch-file, C-routine, or even a Macro to accomplish this will save you much time and effort. It will also serve to STANDARDIZE all the sections in your document, which is a very important point. If your sections are not standardized, your document will appear sloppy and thrown together.

Last updated on: Thu Jun 15 16:30:44 PDT 1995