10.2 Changing headers and footers

You can consider each web page as having a header and a footer, much like a printed page. The header is any information that appears at the top of the web page, before the content. The footer is any information that appears at the bottom of the web page, after the content. Typically, the headers and footers include navigation buttons, the main title of the web document, and the date of update. In the predefined rules, the phrase "Generated by Harlequin WebMaker" and a link to the Harlequin home page appears in the footer.

You might want to customize the headers or footers. For example, you might want the footer to contain information about your company, to display your company's logo, to contain a copyright notice, and to remove the phrase "Generated by Harlequin WebMaker".

The headers and footers are controlled by node rules. Node rules are in the predefined files nodesB.wml, nodesTI.wml, nodesBTI.wml, and nodejava.wml. Each of these files contains a set of node rules. The node rules are not mapped directly to paragraph tags; instead, paragraph rules are defined to use node rules. For example, the L1H1NodeTop paragraph rule uses the LevelOne node rule.

We recommend a slightly different procedure for editing node rules than the procedure for editing paragraph conversion rules. For conversion rules, we copy a few rules to another file and modify those rules. For node rules, we recommend this procedure:

1. Identify the predefined node rules file that most closely matches the conversion behavior you want to achieve. For example, we identify the nodesBTI.wml file.

2. Copy the entire file to a new filename, such as custom-nodes.wml.

3. Edit the node rules in custom-nodes.wml to change the appearance of the headers and footers, as desired. Do not change the names of the node rules. They must keep the same names because the paragraph rules are defined to use node rules of these names.

4. As an initial test of whether you have written correct WML syntax, open the custom-nodes.wml file in WebMaker. WebMaker will report any syntactic errors it finds.

5. Modify the WML file that contains mappings between paragraph tags and predefined conversion rules to include the file custom-nodes.wml, and not to include the file you copied (in this example, nodesBTI.wml).

6. To test the node rules, convert the document and view the result in a browser.