User-defined Tags and Components

heitml's power lies in the possibility to define your own tags and components and to reuse them multiple times on your Web site. Look at the content of the next paragraph. It defines the Mylogo component.

HALLO can now be reused multiple times on this page.

The new MYLOGO component can be edited as any other component. It however does not show up in the insert menu. However you can create an ordinary heitml page and copy components from there into your Web site.

You can define components as well as tags. Tags can not be edited like a component with RADpage, but they expose the same functionality when a page is displayed. Defining tags is often useful for procedures or functions that are used inside programs and so are better edited with a text editor.

To use a component on more than one page, you need to define it in an include file. This include file then needs to be included into each heitml page that references the component.

heitml uses so called page layouts. A page layout is in fact an include file that defines a variety of components and tags. Especially the body component is defined in a layout. For example the layout file used in this page defines body to show a menu on the left hand side.

Using the wizard you can associate a page with a page layout. heitml offers deflayout.hei and outlayout.hei as possible layouts and you can create your own layouts. The best way to do that is to copy one of these layout files (they reside in the layout subdirectory) and then start to modify them. You can add your own component and tag definitions and you can change the definition of the body component. The latter is useful to define certain features that repeat on each page automatically.