How to adjust HTML elements using org-publish in Emacs

Question

I am attempting to use org-publish for site generation, and want to alter the html elements currently being exported.

Using #+INCLUDE statements within the org files doesn't allow for the markup I am after, so I think the best approach is to adjust the :html-preamble and :html-postamble arguments within the org-publish-project-alist variable.

When including :html-preamble and :html-postamble properties the default markup exported goes something like this:

<div id="preamble" class="status">...</div>
<div id="content" class="content">...</div>
<div id="postamble" class="status">...</div>

however I want to change the divs to a more semantic markup such as this:

<header id="preamble">...</header>
<main id="content">...</main>
<footer id="postamble">...</footer>

I thought this could be acheived by setting the :html-divs property like so:

:html-divs '((preamble "header" "preamble")
             (content "main" "content")
             (postamble "footer" "postamble"))

but this results in:

<nil id="nil" class="status">...</nil>
<nil id="nil" class="content">...</nil>
<nil id="nil" class="status">...</nil>

I have no idea why and could do with some pointers here.

To look over my code visit the project on gitlab

Answer 1

Do not quote property values inside the (quasi-)quoted form that you set org-publish-project-alist to! That's too much quoting.

Try:

...
:html-divs ((preamble "header" "preamble")
            (content "main" "content")
            (postamble "footer" "postamble"))
...

You've already (quasi-)quoted the whole value. If you quote the inner value, all you are doing is wrapping it in a quote form:

:html-divs (quote ((preamble "header" "preamble")
                   (content "main" "content")
                   (postamble "footer" "postamble")))

which stays there because of the outer (quasi-)quote, so the value is a list of two things: the symbol quote and a list of three lists. The code however expects it to be a list of three lists: chaos ensues :-)