On Wed, Jun 23, 1999, Dennis Reichel wrote:
> There appears to be a steep learning curve and a good deal of labor involved
> in setting up and maintaining a WML managed/(generated?) site:
Sure, WML is a hacker tool intended to solve problems other tools cannot
solve. The price is the higher learning curve...
> Where do the labor savings enter?
I would start poking around in the templates of existing websites. There is
list on the website with URLs to those templates.
> At what relative complexity or size site does WML become a useful tool?
I use WML even for single pages. But I'm biased, of course. Actually WML's
power can only be seen when generating a web _area_, i.e. at least two or
three pages which should use the same design and code.
> Is WML used at design time, run time, or both?
Pure design time, i.e. WML is an offline tool. Ok, some people even use it
online, but I personally think this is crazy except for some rare situations.
> Does Apache require a special module, handlers or other modification to use
> WML capabilities?
No, the output of WML is plain markup code. You don't need any fancy server
feature to use it. This was one of the goals of WML and the reason why I
dislike websites created with tons of PHP code...
> What skillsets are required to use WML effectively - Perl scripting? m4
> macro language? etc..
As a good start one usually just has to work with a few HTML tags given by
pass 2 of WML (Meta-HTML). When you want to do more hacking, you usually need
a little bit Perl knowledge, yes. But you can also do your hacking in m4 when
you want. That's not always important - WML provides with the tools. Use those
of the provides tools you can manage.
> How is WML likened to CSS (cascading style sheets)
WML technically has nothing to do with CSS. CSS is just some more text you put
into WML source files the same way you put in there HTML, JavaScript, etc. So
there is no problem in using CSS with WML. Same for any other forthcoming web
markup standard: WML is always prepared for it ;)
Ralf S. Engelschall
rse@engelschall.com
www.engelschall.com
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