10 Modifying Conversion Rules, Headers, and Footers

There are two cases in which you need to edit WML files directly:

1. When you have experimented with the conversion rules available in the libraries, and you need a behavior that no predefined rule provides. In this case, you can create a new WML rule. See Section 10.1, "Creating new WML conversion rules".

2. When you want to customize the appearance of the headers or footers of the HTML pages. See Section 10.2, "Changing headers and footers".

WebMaker Language (WML) is a macro language documented fully in Chapter 12, "WebMaker Language (WML)". It is possible to read the reference documentation of WML and create WML files from scratch. However, it is much easier to copy the definition of an existing rule and modify it. Typically, you can find a rule that does almost what you want, copy that rule, and modify the copy of that rule to do exactly what you want. This chapter describes how to do so.