understanding swpage.wml

[Jeff McCarrell <nospam@thanx>]

Hi.  I am trying to understand how best to use wml, and I have been
examining swpage.wml.  I have a couple of questions:

What is the top level command that builds all of the pages?  I assume that
it is some wmk command, perhaps from a Makefile of some sort?

In this fragment:

     74	      <ifeq "$(areaparent)" ""
     75	          <if <match "<get-var WML_SRC_FILENAME>" "index\\..*">
     76	              <set-var areaparent="../">
     77	              <set-var areaparent="">
     78	          >
     79	          <set-var areaparent="$(areaparent)">
     80	      >

what is the motive for doing this?  I mean, I understand what the code is
doing, but why do you want the parent directory when the source filename
starts with index. ?

This code:

    130	..!PAGE_TITLE!>>
    131	Unknown Page
    132	<<..

sets up a default for the PAGE_TITLE named diversion.  Why is this a good
thing to do?  It seems to me that there are a number of other (simpler) 
ways of
defining default values for things.  Why is the method of using a default 
diversion
used here?

As an observation, the thing about wml that is giving me the most difficulty
is trying to understand how to put the whole thing together in a sensible way.
Publishing swpage.wml has been very helpful for me, to see the whole thing
working together.

A tarball of the site that I could modify and run the passes of 
individually to examine
the intermediate output would help too.  Is that available somewhere?

The other meta level question I have is how actively is wml being used?  I 
know that
is a subjective question, but if you have an opinion, I'd like to hear it.

Thanks in advance for your help...

-- jeff

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