This is a collection of Python classes designed to analyse the contents of a filesystem for text documents, and return structures such that the documents can be easily displayed by a web server, and linked with other documents within the filesystem.
It implements a simple filesystem syntax inspired by Dave Gruber's Markdown, a syntax permitting easy writing for the web. The idea was to expand markdown to include structuring collections of documents in a filesystem of folders and subfolders, and using software in a webserver to index them and provide links between them.
The simple syntax provides for a set of predictable filenames which are human- and machine-readable, and which relate text or html documents to other files, like images and figures.
For example, if you want to start writing a book, you would create a
folder called MyBook. Into this folder, you create text files for
each of the chapters of the book. When you visit MyBook in a
browser, you would see a list of the chapters, with links so you can
visit each chapter.
The syntax is designed to be implemented in a web server, providing a way of automatically linking related pages together. An important consideration, however, is that the archive can be read without the software. Written material is stored as ASCII-encoded text (or UTF-8, or Unicode, or any text encoding). Image files used as figures in the text are kept in predictable locations, and can be viewed with an image viewer. Files can be edited directly with a text editor, or with forms provided by the webnote webserver software.
A full description of the simple syntax can be found in the wiki for this project.
This repository contains Python classes for analysing directory
structures for readable files, inline images and metadata. It also
includes a Django project as a test implementation. The code files for
these two components are separated within the root directory into
webnote/ and djsrv/ respectively.
Further information is available in the project wiki.