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Re: Examples: WML Itself

> I've poked around in this website and it looks good and clean.  And because of
> the good similarity of the page layout a WML-based approach is a good one,
> too.

Thanks!

> Just a few things I've discovered:

> 1. The pages have 
>    <body bgcolor="#000000" text=ffff60 link=00d0d0 vlink=00a0a0 alink=ff7070>
>    First, as a side question, how can does be created with WML?
>    WML (at least from 1.4.7 up) would create:

I'm currently at 1.3 (not keeping up with every upgrade).  The definition
of <tspage> is:

<define-container tspage>
<preserve title>
<set-var %attributes>
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0//EN">
<html*><head*><title*><get-var title></title>
<link rel=StyleSheet href="http://www.truespectra.com/truespectra.css"
      title="TrueSpectra Style Sheet" type="text/css">
</head>
<body bgcolor=000000 text=ffff60 link=00d0d0 vlink=00a0a0
alink=ff7070>
	[more stuff, probably not important]
</tspage>

I found it odd that bgcolor was the only one to get quotes, but didn't
consider it important enough to fix.  I'll just update the tag definition
so that it generates sensible HTML.

> 2. The colors from 1.) are not all in the 216-color-cube (browser
>    safe colors). To avoid color substitutions, I recommend you
>    to align them to the nearest ones from the color-cube.

A good idea.

> 2. On a few pages I see in the source that you successfully used
>    wml::std::toc. Great! ;_)

It's handy.

> 3. There are a lot of pages with absolute hyperlinks in them
>    like ``<a href="http://www.truespectra.com/..''. I personally thing this
>    makes your site a little bit static. For instance you cannot easily make a
>    version under a subdir where you work and from where the pages are then
>    distributed to the final place.


Actually, there is.  All links, with few exceptions, are generated via the
<linkto> tag which I generated, and which uses an environment variable to
set the document root.  e.g. 

<linkto place="Products_PhotoGraphics">this is a link to photographics
stuff</linkto>

The stuff that does not link in this mannger is, for now, a pain to
maintain.  Images are done with relative directories (images/foo.jpg).

>    start with / only. Or even better: Use WML's auto-adustable path variables
>    and let WML calculate the relative paths between each page. See the ``WML
>    Itself'' pages and how I let WML calculate all URLs in the navbars via this
>    approach.

I'm not sure that I used this facility, not having seen it, but used
something fairly similar.

> 4. There are images like ``img
>    src="http://www.truespectra.com/images/tsramp-mini.jpg" alt="TrueSpectra
>    Home Page" border="0">''. Here I again wondering how this can survive WML,

$DOCROOT + "images/tsramp-mini.jpg", located in wml::usr::ts.wml

For some reason the defined-tag expansion occurred after the <img>
width expansion?
I certainly didn't use <img*>

>    at least add them manually by piping the SSI-includes through WML to easily
>    determine the width/height dimensions.

We don't use any SSI at the moment, so I admit to being somewhat perplexed
by this.

> That's an interesting file-system-based approach for a navbar.  Hmmmmm... if
> you can limite the files that's fine this way.  But which feature for the
> grammar-based wml::des::navbar would be required to let us create the same
> with it? I just ask because there have to be a reason why you choose your
> approach.  Perhaps I've missed some essential feature in wml::des::navbar
> which restricts it too much in use? Just give a few hints. Thanks.  Or did you
> start your work on the navbar before wml::des::navbar arrived?

<thinks>

In the man pages I've got for 1.3, navbar was documented as needing to be
finished.  I was also somewhat obsessive about the presentation,
preferring:
* the hierarchical display ("twistie"-like behaviour in e.g. Win95 or
	MacOS)
* not using images nor image maps to render the display:
	style sheets were the way to go

There were some other limitations; the huge majority of the company's
visitors are users of our OS/2 product; that platform hasn't progressed
past 3.0, and the JavaScript support seemed to be unstable.  I preferred
to avoid that.

So I simply rolled my own.

> In general to summarize: The complete website looks good. Keep on your work...

Thanks!

You too, a very handy tool.  The alternative was frontpage!

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