Minimalist Online Docmentation

Overview

Minimalist Online Documentation (MOD) is a very simple document format specification that tries to make it easier to build and maintain a documentation-based website. This tutorial will lead you through the process of creating a new web site using MOD. Here's the basic process. Each of these steps will be covered in greater depth as you go through the tutorial:

Each web site that you maintain will have a "source tree"; these are the files written in MOD format that contain the content of your web site. When you're done making changes to the source files, you run the mod2html program to convert the tree to HTML and install it at its destination.

1. Create a new source directory. Decide on a location for your MOD source tree and create a new empty directory for it.

2. Create source files. Now you can create the source files in the source directory that contain the real content for your site. They contain tags that tell mod2html about the basic structure of your document. mod2html will search the source tree for these files, and use the file and directory names to give titles to your documents and create a navigation tree for you. MOD source files end in the extension ".mod", although if you just have plain text files that don't need any special features offered by the MOD tags, you can just give them the extension ".txt".

3. Run mod2html. Finally, you're ready to run the interpreter and generate your web site. After that, each time you make any modifications to the source tree, just re-run the mod2html command, and it will update the files in your destination that need to be adjusted.

The tutorial doesn't explain all of the features of MOD, but it does give you enough to get started. You can learn about MOD's more advanced features by browsing the reference.