When writing web-sites, you typically either write the HTML code or use a 'WYSIWYG' (What You See Is What You Get) editor to make it for you. Some sites use dynamic content languages, e.g., ASP or PHP, to generate their code for them on the fly. SWL is an efficient alternative to each of these.
SWL is, simply put, abbreviated HTML. In fact, with a 2 character header, most HTML files can be put directly into a SWL file and compile back to the same HTML they started out as. But, SWL offers an alternative to writing 'bulk HTML', through the use of 'line-tags'. A line-tag is a brief ID (usually a single character) followed by a closed angle bracket, '>'.
Using line-tags, you can reduce:
<table>
<tr>
<td> A1 </td>
<td> B1 </td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td> A2 </td>
<td> B2 </td>
</tr>
</table>
To:
t>
A1 B1
A2 B2
/>
- Easy to learn. Easy to write. Easy to use.
- Brevity. SWL code is as short as it gets. SWL source files (without file includes) tend to be one half to one third the size of the HTML they generate.
- Brevity. The HTML that SWL outputs doesn't include unnecessary information 8515 . WYSIWYG editors tend to put lots of junk line breaks and font information.
- Brevity. Copy a document you want to publish into a text 'SWL' file. It's almost ready for publication. Your paragraphs are already set. To format your headings will take 2 characters each. To format your tables usually takes the addition of 4 characters.
- No loss in developing potential. Anything that SWL doesn't recognize won't be changed in your object HTML.
- Plays well with others. SWL is perfect for use with CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). A lot of the junk that WYSIWYG editors pump out is for formatting each individual section. Using a style sheet in your SWL template will automatically make every similar tag look the same, without junk code. Most document editors (e.g., MS Word, Adobe Pagemaker) already include 'style' information which can be directly interpreted into SWL. You could even write your PHP in SWL with just a flip of the template.
- Plays well with others. SWL can import data from plain text, HTML, tab delimited text, and comma separated values (CSV).
- Clean HTML. The ugliest SWL code outputs to easy-to-read HTML. SWL indents nested tags and puts white space between major sections.
- Efficiency. Once you compile your SWL into HTML, it's done. When you use PHP and ASP to generate your pages, your web server has to start a program to compile it every time someone looks at it on the web. You only have to compile SWL once.
- Extensibility. You can make your own 'SWL tags' on the fly in your document. You can use SWL's internal variables to change the ones it already has. You can create templates and template modifications on the fly in your SWL documents, or include them from an external SWL library.
- You don't have to be a programmer. You could teach a monkey to write 'SWL' and they would like it so much that they would forget to eat.
- Etc.
SWL is like HTML in that HTML tags can be put into a SWL document and will be preserved. Unline HTML, SWL is in-line. That is, in HTML, you can have a paragraph spanning multiple lines in your code. In SWL, each line of code is assumed to be a unique, self-contained paragraph. Using 'tags' at the beginning of a line, you can specify different formatting behavior for an individual line of code or a range of lines, using the following syntacies.
Single Line of 'Tag' Formatting
tag> single line of content
Multiple Lines on which 'Tag' will operate.
tag>
content lines
content lines
/>
To see the various ways to you can format your code, refer to the tag reference.
By nesting tags, you can create outlines, break out rows in tables, and much more. Here's the general idea:
Through SWL's system of tag nesting, all of the following syntacies are functionally the same:
a>
b>
content
/>
/>
a>
b>content
/>
a.b> content
Note that there are 2 closing tags nested in this example.
a.b>
content
/./>
So, this also works.
a.b>
content
/>
/>
By simply enclosing links or image file URL's in spaced angle-brackets, you can automatically create full image or anchor tags without the syntax hastle. These tags can be placed anywhere in your code, not constrained to the beginning of the line. Note: the space after the opening < is required. SWL will assume that any URL's containing the @ (at) symbol are email links. Images must end with .gif, .jpg, .jpeg, .svg or .png. I have ambitions of adding support for other media extentions.
< link link_text >
< image alternate_text properties >
< "link with spaces" "link text with spaces" >
< "image file name" "alternate text" "properties with spaces" >
SWL makes your website portable. You can specify in a single location where your entire document tree lies on the web. This allows SWL to manage all of your links when you move your site. All you have to do is change the root variable and forcibly recompile your entire site (which is only one command).
To use this feature, specify your web root in your template (usually local.swlt or @.swlt in your document root) and use ~/ in all of your links to specify that your link is relative to your web root. For example:
=.root>//cixar.com/~swilly
< ~/index.html "Swilly's Homepage" >
SWL can mangle your site's email addresses to reduce the risk of web crawlers harvesting your email for unsolicited email, SPAM. To activate this feature, specify the email-mangle variable in your site template and forcibly recompile your site with the command "swl -f .".
=.email-mangle>yes
1-6headers*bulleted list#numbered listttable-horizontal rulepparagraphs (default)Pstanza (single paragraph with line breaks)janchorooutline"pre+include^.tagmacro=.namevariable assignmentc.year.month.daycalendar!comment