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[forward to list: html-helper-mode]

Apologies: Due to a workstation gliche yesterday, some of my outgoing mail did not make it out.
I'm resending messages that I feel were important, my apologies if you see a message more than once.

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html-helper-mode is orders of magnitude more powerful than
the default html-mode.el in emacs.

I'm attaching the lcd information out of html-helper-mode.el
as well as the root documentation.html file.
I have not confirmed that any of the addresses listed there
are current.

;; LCD Archive Entry:
;; html-helper-mode|Nelson Minar|nelson@xxxxxxxxxxx|
;; Major mode for editing HTML.|
;; 16-Mar-94|Version 2.0|ftp://ftp.reed.edu/pub/src/html-helper-mode.tar.Z
Title: html-helper-mode documentation

html-helper-mode documentation

Basic functionality: inserting cookies

The main function of html-helper-mode is to make it easy to insert HTML cookies. html-helper-mode does its best to do this consistently and conveniently. For every HTML and HTML+ cookie there should be a template which contains the text of the cookie itself and information as to where the fields are that the user might want to fill in.

Each template can be activated in one of two ways: by typing the key sequence for the cookie, or by completing on the beginning of the cookie. For example, C-cC-bt will insert the string <title></title>, and position point where you want to type the title. Or, you could type <kb and hit M-TAB, and the tag <kbd></kbd> will be inserted.

If a command is called with a prefix argument (by pressing C-u first), then instead of inserting the cookie at the point the cookie is inserted around the region. Thus, C-uC-cC-pb will wrap the <b></b> token around region, thereby making it bold.

A separate file contains a complete list of keybindings. Be warned, there are a lot - you might want to get used to completion.

Fields

More complicated cookies have several fields that need filling in. For example, a hyperlink (<a href=""></a>) has two fields - the URL and the link description. When a multiple-field cookie is inserted, point will be placed at the first field and then the other fields will be entered on a special list. M-C-f and M-C-b will make the point skip back and forth on this list.

html-helper-mode can prompt you in the minibuffer for all of the fields a cookie need. For example, you can have it ask you to type in the URL: and link description fields in a hyperlink. This feature is turned off by default - for information on how to turn it on, read about configuring html-helper-mode.

Indentation

HTML documents can have nested lists: these are a bit hard to read in source form. html-helper-mode has code to indent lists cookies to the appropriate depth depending on how deeply nested the list is. List cookies are automatically indented when they are inserted. To indent a line by hand, hit TAB.

The indentation code is a bit of a hack - it doesn't really parse the HTML document very carefully. The main restriction is that cookies that are parts of lists (for example, <ul> or <li>) should appear at the beginning of their lines for the code to work best.

New document skeletons

When a new HTML document is created, html-helper-mode can insert a skeleton with all the tags every HTML document should have. This feature is turned off by default - see the documentation for configuring html-helper-mode to turn it on and to customize the skeleton.

Timestamps

Good HTML documents should all have timestamps stating the last time they were modified. html-helper-mode can make this easy by automatically updating your timestamp. This feature is turned off by default - see the documentation for configuring html-helper-mode to turn it on and to customize the timestamp.

Emacs editing support

One of the joys of emacs is that it is pretty smart about parsing the contents of the buffer. However, HTML is fairly outside of the realm of what emacs thinks is a programming language, so the syntax support html-helper-mode provides isn't that helpful. It does define > as a match for <, and emacs knows about HTML comment syntax, so you can type M-; to get a comment.

Highlighting

If you have hilit19 loaded in your emacs, then html-helper-mode will automatically set up regular expressions to colour links, HTML cookies, included images, and comments. I think this is one of the most useful features of html-helper-mode. For these patterns to be installed correctly hilit19 must be loaded before html-helper-mode.

I do not use font-lock, so currently there are no font-lock patterns defined. However, there is user-contributed font-lock code on the net.

Customization

Once you have html-helper-mode installed, you probably will want to customize a few things. For more information, see the document on configuring html-helper-mode.

Emacs 18

I don't use emacs18 anymore - 19 is quite stable and much nicer. I've tried to make sure html-helper-mode works in emacs18, and it seems to right now, but it is not being well supported. If you can, upgrade to emacs19.

Nelson Minar <nelson@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Last modified: Thu Feb 2 14:15:43 1995
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