What is WebLord?
WebLord is an object-oriented text processing tool.
WebLord's general nature makes it powerful but also rather difficult to describe in a concise manner: WebLord can be one thing to you and an entirely different thing to the next person! WebLord began life as a Web Site Constructor, but has grown to help you build any series of related documents, which might include HTML, LaTeX, plain text, etc.
Note: Unless you already have an understanding of how WebLord works, you are strongly encouraged to read this section carefully. It may impart an understanding that can be crucial to your ability to use WebLord productively!
Let's begin by defining three terms, each of which represents a type of object:
- site
- A site may be regarded as a web site or a document. The distinguishing feature is that a site consists of one or more pages.
- page
- A page is a single resource, often larger than a traditional page of paper, but still representing a single unit of sorts. It is most often stored in a single file, available for retrieval.
- text
- Text is anything that can go onto a page. Text is not merely readable characters, but actually any sequence of data representing human-readable text, references to images, movies, audio sections, entry forms; text can be defined directly, or obtained from the contents of a file, even be the result of another program's output.
What does WebLord actually do?
(Or: What's the bare minimum I need to know?)
WebLord assembles a recursive sequence of objects into a collection of pages for a document.
More specifically, WebLord evaluates objects in sequence. Each of these objects are a sequence of text. This text may come from a file (see value-type for an example), from text that you typed directly, or information generated by an external program (see exec for an example.)
The level of complexity of these objects may be minimal or it may be complex. you determine the definitions of these objects according to your need; you determine how complex or how simple they should be.
Let's try an example: Define two text objects (a header and a footer), two pages (that use these headers and footers, but have a different page body), and the whole thing held together by the singular site object that defines the default set of pages for the site:
text Header { value = "The Header\n"; }
text Footer { value = "The Footer\n"; }
page Test-1 { value = Header "Test Page\n" Footer; }
page Test-2 { value = Header "WebLord is great\n" Footer; }
site main { pages = Test-1 Test-2; }
We have now two Text Objects, 'Header' and 'Footer', as well as two Page Objects, 'Test-1' and 'Test-2'. The Text Objects ('header' and 'footer') are rather simple. It is the Page Objects where things get interesting:
The value of each of these two pages consists of 'Header' and 'Footer' which surround a quoted string. The quoted string differs from one page to the next, but the words 'Header' and 'Footer' are the same.
The example above points out a subtle, but important point. Notice that each page has a value of three "words": The 'Header', some quoted string, and the 'Footer'. Notice also that the 'Header' and 'Footer' are not quoted. This is an important distinction from quoted strings!
WebLord understands two types of symbols: constants and references. Constants are quoted (enclosed in "..." or '...' or »...«) and references are not quoted. This means that the references (such as 'Header' and 'Footer' in the example above) are evaluated, but the quoted strings are mere constants.
While constants are simply used as-is, all references are evaluated. This means that the value of references is somehow determined according to WebLord's rules. The act of referencing a property or object causes its value to be determined, i.e. a reference is made to produce a value that is equivalent to text but can be influenced in various ways to differ from one reference (or object invocation) to the next.
This is a key concept of WebLord. If you did not understand the preceding paragraph, try reading it again.
Summary
Fundamentally, collecting text, evaluating references, and connecting these into a sequence of text for each page is all that WebLord does. This apparently simple concept produces surprisingly elaborate results, however!
The documentation that you are reading, for example, was produced with WebLord, as were a number of private and commercial web sites that are all rather different from each other. This fact alone bears witness to WebLord's flexibility and stands in notable contrast to the results produced by some other software, whose flashy interface might be easy to use but whose otherwise rigid focus produces often repetitive and ever recognizable output.
WebLord, on the other hand, is a power tool: It enables you to let your creativity flow without tying you down with pre-determined ideas of presentation and structure. In fact, WebLord will allow you to create any number of different types of documents, from web sites, LaTeX documentation, AmigaGuide® files, or just plain text files. If you can envision it, WebLord will help you construct it!
Of course, WebLord's focus on flexibility requires a certain investment from you in terms of time and effort to learn the software and the concepts. Once you understand what WebLord does for you, however, you will never be able to go back to managing documents the hard way.
Where to go from here?
The best place to start is with the Getting Started page and the Tutorial section. After that you should use the index page to locate information as you need it.
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