It's not about AWK

This is not an AWK help page, but rather it's a page that tries to give an intuitive description of the awklang.org site, the site for things related to the awk language. As you may have already noticed, most awklang.org pages conform to a uniform design. Actually, most of the pages has the following areas: header (top), navigator (left), main (right) and footer (bottom). You may have also noticed that some of the pages lack of navigation area, as there is no navigation needed on those pages. Each one of the above major areas plays a specific role which is described below.

Header

It's the top area of every page and contains an icon (left), a title and some buttons (right). The icon on the left side is called the awk icon, or navigation toggle button. Actually, this icon is just an icon on navigator missing pages, while it becomes a navigation toggle button on pages equipped with navigation area.

Navigation toggle button can be used to expand/shrink the navigator as a whole with just one click. Users, at anytime, may click any navigator button, but it's rather helpful to full expand or totally shrink the navigator as a whole by just clicking on the awk icon.

At the right side of the header area are lying some tabs or buttons. Most of the tabs open standard pages like help page, FAQ page etc. Other tabs may be used to close children pages, change the theme of the page, or return to the home page.

Home tab

By clicking the Home tab, home page is refreshed and focused. That tab is present to all of the pages, even in the home page itself.

Skin tab

Skin tab can be used to toggle between a few number of preinstalled color themes. It's a matter of taste which theme every user uses. Current skin is stored in a cookie, thus whenever the skin changes all pages will open using the new skin. Skin can be set in the URL using the skin variable, e.g. awklang.org?skin=debug, awklang.org?skin=metro etc. Valid skin values are: debug, default, metro, muted.

Help tab

Help tab displays the page you are reading now.

FAQ tab

FAQ tab displays a page of frequently asked questions and answers.

About tab

About tab displays useful information about the awklang.org site.

Close tab

Clicking the Close tab causes current page to be closed. Close tab is present only in pages initiated from other site pages.

Navigator

Most pages are equipped with a navigator area on the left side. Navigator area contains a set of navigation items displayed as a vertical series of tabs or buttons. Evey navigation item may play one of the following roles: External link, internal link (anchor), download button and sub-navigator. Clicking on an external link item displays a new page, while clicking on an internal link or anchor will scroll the current page to the corresponding section. Download buttons are used for downloading useful files such as function libraries, programs ets.

Sub-navigators are more navigator items enclosed in parent navigator items. Clicking on a sub-navigator item will open/close the relevant menu. To open/close all of the navigator items to the deepest/lowest level can be achieved by clicking the awk icon at the upper left corner of the page. Alternatively, the nvgexp URL parameter causes navigator menus to fully expand on page load. Try this:

awklang.org?nvgexp

Right next to the navigator area exists a slider handler which can be used to change the width of both the navigator and the main area by dragging the slider horizontally.

Main area

In the right side of the page lives the most significant part of the page, called the main area. Main content of the page is displayed in that area. Content may contain anchors which can be used to navigate up or down; it's likely that the anchors have correspondig navigating items in the navigation area, either as first level tabs, or enclosed in higher level tabs (menus).

Footer

Footer is the bottom part of every page, containing complementary site information such as license, modification date, copyright etc.