Content Parser system

Executive Summary

Content stored in human-readable text files.
Displayed in the best format for the web browser/client being used.
All server-side (Perl) - no client-side scripting required.
Works with both Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS) and Apache web servers.
Generated content cached for really fast responses.

More Details

The Content Parser System is a remarkably simple concept, which started off in 2001 when (as Webmaster for the University of Warwick Computing Society) it was decided that all the Executive members, and even society members, should be able to provided content for the website without fighting the then complicated and messy HTML used. And thus the "CPS" format was born:

There is nothing magical to CPS, really; it just works. What we have here is plain text, nothing more, nothing less. * But wait! * We can do bullets! 1. And numbered lists! 2. Simple, eh?

The above snipit is just a sample of what CPS can cope with when reading in the plain text source files. It doesn't just do bold, italic, underline and monospace text, it does bulleted lists, numbered lists (with numerics, alphas or even Roman Numerals), normal hypertext links, embeded images, and even full tables - complete with row and column spanning. Oh, and I forgot to even mention the headings!

So, you want to see the source to this page? Certainly! View this page's source. Don't worry if you want to keep the source hidden, CPS naturally defaults to preventing access to anything other than the generated output, but I've enabled viewing the source throughout my site (just stick "?source" onto the URL, or click the menu item 'View Source').