Syntactically, WOM is a superset of HTML. WOM commands start with a left pointed bracket followed by a name, and may take a sequence of arguments before terminating with a right pointed bracket. The standard way to pass arguments is by keyword rather than position, but the compiler allows some commonly used arguments to be passed also by position:
<TextField t>
<TextField id=t value="" size=10>
<Menu TaxRates options={0,5,10,15,20,22 to 40 by 2}>
<Menu VATChange options={"Scrap it!":0, "Double it!":2}>
<Attribute a>
<Class Top Book>
In the examples above, some of the arguments are simple constants, such
as 10 and ""; others, in curly brackets, are
lists.
As well as keyworded and positional arguments, WOM recognises
``defaultable Boolean arguments''. These are keyworded arguments with no
value specified, where the keyword on its own means
that the value must be true. Thus
<File name="d:\ho\Temp.htm" isHTML> <File name="d:\ho\Temp.htm" isHTML=true>both mean the same.
In the rest of this paper, I shall use the word element rather than command, for compatibility with HTML terminology.
Some elements act as brackets, and must be terminated by a closing
bracket, in the same way as HTML elements like FORM and
BLOCKQUOTE. These include WOMForm and OnSubmit:
<OnSubmit rexx>
{ $output~setValue( $input~getValue ) }
</OnSubmit>
Again following HTML terminology, we call these containers.
A container will normally hold either a Rexx code insert as
above, or more text as below:
<WOMForm> Enter data here:<TextField t> </WOMForm>
In general, names are case-insensitive, so
<Menu TaxRates options={0,5,10,15,20,22 to 40 by 2}>
<MENU taxrates OPTIONS={0,5,10,15,20,22 TO 40 BY 2}>
are equivalent. By convention, I write ordinary HTML elements in upper-case,
and WOM elements in a mixture of upper and lower-case.