BUG REPORT: Website META Language 2.0.9 (18-Oct-2002)

__        ___  __ _     
\ \      / / \/  | |      Website META Language
 \ \ /\ / / |\/| | |      Version 2.0.9 (18-Oct-2002)
  \ V  V /| |  | | |___ 
   \_/\_/ |_|  |_|_____|  BUG REPORT
_________________________________________________________

From:     Christian Cornelssen
Reply-To: [email protected]

PROBLEM DESCRIPTION:

First, thanks for WML.  I have made my web pages with WML, you can
view them at <http://user.cs.tu-berlin.de/~ccorn/>.  They are utterly
plain yet, and there are many blanks to fill in and style sheets
to be added, but look at the software/rpm/packages/ subdir which
is completely autogenerated.  Note also that it contains support
to build WML as an RPM package.  You may also want to distribute
the WML icon in the footers, it's the hi-res banner from the WML
home page, downsized to the "standard" 88x31 button format using
ImageMagick with the command

	convert banner-wml.jpg -crop 0x0 -geometry 86x30 	-bordercolor white -border 9x0 -crop 86x29+1 	-mattecolor grey -frame 1x1+1+0 -colors 256 wml.png

Oh, by the way (actually the first bug report): For some unknown
reason, my viewer (zgv-5.2) could not display the supplied
logo-wml.gif (though the browser "links-2" could).  I regenerated
it from logo-wml.png:

	convert logo-wml.png logo-wml.gif

and then even zgv was satisfied.

My overall impression is that WML is a very powerful and fairly
complete toolset.  Despite its richness, it has encouraged me to
use many of the accompanying utilities, notably txt2html, tidy,
linklint, and weblint.  Even wmd, which I first considered pointless,
has turned out to be very handy, because it suggests and accelerates
access to the reference pages and thus speeds up getting familiar
with WML.  wmk greatly simplifies the update commands (it's slow
and verbose but safe).  In total, the system has enhanced my web
productivity significantly, and it's both amazingly powerful and
easy to use, which is a rather rare combination.

[Macros] The supplied wml::std::lang macros seem to have been
somewhat neglected however, they tend to be rather fragile
and special-purpose.  I have tried the multi-language macros,
but <lang:area> never worked correctly.  IIRC, that macro produced
errors or did not select the correct language, even though <lang:new:
... > had been declared correctly.  <lang:star:href: ... /> leaves
<suck>s in the output although I have not disabled any WML passes.

Also, the design of some macro packages is not as powerful as
the WML toolset in general.  <lang:star:href:>, for example,
relies upon the prior creation of the referenced files, which
creates additional dependencies that wmk cannot be made aware of.
I decided to avoid using <lang:star:href:> and to scan the file
tree with an own "fixlinks" script afterwards.  (I can clean up
the code and contribute the script if you like.)

I was gladly surprised by the idea of wml::fmt::text, but then
I chose to write my own external script using txt2html directly.
The script generates RPM descriptions in WML format from source
RPM files.  I needed to make sure that plain <>#$ (and other
characters) would not confuse WML, that txt2html could be called
with custom options, that the levels of autogenerated headers could
be adjusted and that embedded URLs and e-mail addresses would be
marked up specifically.

[Docs] I am not an Englishman, but to my impression the
language in the docs regularly deviates from accepted orthography.
Frequent occurences:

	WRONG		RIGHT		CONTEXT

	built time	build time	wml.1
	is build	is built	wml::std::box.3
	features build	features built	wml_faq.7
	then		than		(comparisons)
	behaviour	behavior	wml_p2_mp4h.1
	substract	subtract	arithmetic macros

with "substract" actually being consistent with the sources.  The word
may make ethymological sense, but I'd prefer "subtract" at least as an
alias.

Actually WML_SRC_DIRNAME and WML_SRC_FILENAME seem to be the absolute
directory and the (directory-free) remainder of the wml input file.
If so, this should be clarified in wml.1 (but to be honest, I do
not recall the details of my respective early experiments, perhaps
I have used wmk instead of wml and misinterpreted the result).
In any case, I'd like to know whether it is correct to use
/.xxx to construct a filename
adjacent to the WML input filename.

[WML Tools] I have found that missing/unmatched parentheses in an -o
option with a slice expression lead to confusing error messages from
wml_p9_slice.  I'd like to have more error checking and reporting
there, and perhaps the case of unmatched parentheses could be tested
by the wml(1) frontend too, in order to avoid lengthy processing
before the final failure.

In wmd, I'd suggest to add "elinks" and "links" (my favorite text-mode
browsers, preferred even over w3m) to @reader_progs.

IPP's #include does not discard backslash-continued #!wml lines from
the included file.  (I use "#include '*.wml' INDEX" with the contents
of the *.wml files conditioned by  to create a directory of
the autogenerated RPM descriptions.)

Best regards,

Christian Cornelssen


PLATFORM CHARACTERISTICS:
Used WML System:
Built Environment:
    Host: i586-pc-linux-gnu2
    Perl: 5.006 (/usr/bin/perl)
    User: [email protected]
    Date: 18-Apr-2003
Built Location:
    Prefix: /usr
    BinDir: /usr/bin
    LibDir: /usr/lib/wml
    ManDir: /usr/share/man

Used Perl System:
Summary of my perl5 (revision 5.0 version 6 subversion 1) configuration:
  Platform:
    osname=linux, osvers=2.4.9, archname=i586-linux
    uname='linux d119 2.4.9 #1 smp wed oct 17 11:35:24 gmt 2001 i686 unknown '
    config_args='-ds -e -Dprefix=/usr -Di_db -Di_dbm -Di_ndbm -Di_gdbm'
    hint=recommended, useposix=true, d_sigaction=define
    usethreads=undef use5005threads=undef useithreads=undef usemultiplicity=undef
    useperlio=undef d_sfio=undef uselargefiles=define usesocks=undef
    use64bitint=undef use64bitall=undef uselongdouble=undef
  Compiler:
    cc='cc', ccflags ='-fno-strict-aliasing -I/usr/local/include -D_LARGEFILE_SOURCE -D_FILE_OFFSET_BITS=64',
    optimize='-O2 -pipe',
    cppflags='-fno-strict-aliasing -I/usr/local/include'
    ccversion='', gccversion='2.95.3 20010315 (SuSE)', gccosandvers=''
    intsize=4, longsize=4, ptrsize=4, doublesize=8, byteorder=1234
    d_longlong=define, longlongsize=8, d_longdbl=define, longdblsize=12
    ivtype='long', ivsize=4, nvtype='double', nvsize=8, Off_t='off_t', lseeksize=8
    alignbytes=4, usemymalloc=n, prototype=define
  Linker and Libraries:
    ld='cc', ldflags =' -L/usr/local/lib'
    libpth=/usr/local/lib /lib /usr/lib
    libs=-lnsl -ldl -lm -lc -lcrypt -lutil
    perllibs=-lnsl -ldl -lm -lc -lcrypt -lutil
    libc=, so=so, useshrplib=false, libperl=libperl.a
  Dynamic Linking:
    dlsrc=dl_dlopen.xs, dlext=so, d_dlsymun=undef, ccdlflags='-rdynamic'
    cccdlflags='-fpic', lddlflags='-shared -L/usr/local/lib'


Characteristics of this binary (from libperl): 
  Compile-time options: USE_LARGE_FILES
  Built under linux
  Compiled at Oct 25 2001 02:15:09
  @INC:
    /usr/lib/perl5/5.6.1/i586-linux
    /usr/lib/perl5/5.6.1
    /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.6.1/i586-linux
    /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.6.1
    /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl
    .
_____________________________________________________________________
Website META Language (WML)                         http://thewml.org
User Support Mailing List                        [email protected]
Automated List Manager                            [email protected]