2.4 Applications

G-Cows is a scripting language, so it's up to you to find out what it can be useful for. The following are just some ideas:

Speed up site creation and maintenance and reduce chances of an error

You can define mail addresses, release versions, file names used in links etc. as variables. By doing so, you can change a definition once and see changes spreading all over the site. You can also include external files in multiple places; again you can change one thing and update every page depending upon it.

Improve HTML readability

You can simplify your HTML code by defining common sequences of HTML tags as variables.

Improve consistency

You can give a consistent look to your site including a common header and footer in every page.

Rationalize site maintenance

G-Cows allows, when used in conjunction with Make, to change a file and update all and only pages depending upon it.

Separate Layout and Contents

Contents usually change faster than layouts so it's a good practice to keep them separated. Also, it will make much easier to keep multiple versions of a web site, differing in contents (e.g. different languages) or layout (e.g. a more complex version and a simpler one for older browsers or visually impaired users).

Handle differences in multiple inclusions

You can include the same file in multiple places and change its behavior according to the situation.

G-Cows is designed to integrate itself with your Unix (or Linux) system in two ways:

When using both features, your system provide both a high level director (Make) and an endless source of features ready to be called by cows scripts (every command and every program with a command line interface).

This manual can be downloaded from http://www.g-cows.org/.