** About the code in this folder **

 [webdir http://bumble.sf.net/lang/web/]

 [faq]

q: what is in this directory?

 this directory contains code useful for web applications.

q: is there a wiki here?

 no. but maybe a few tools which could be used to create a wiki.
 There is a component to create faq lists in HTML and there is
 a component to create directory listings. 

q: What is a wiki?

 The wiki was invented by someone called ward cunningham
 http://c2.com/ and is a way to edit web pages without using html.

q: Is this page dynamically generated?

 no. And the file listing which may occur on this page may not
 be entirely up-to-date.


q: what is the edit directory?

 this link:///edit/ directory contains the beginnings of a text editor
 written in java. The editor is orientated towards saving
 on a ssh server via sftp. this is mainly because this is
 the only way to save to the source forge server.

q: what are these strange codes with square brackets in the
   text files?

 these are a way to provide some structure in an unstructured
 text document.

q: what does that mean?

 one way to provide structure is to use a very strict format
 such as xml. but this means the user has to think in
 heirarchical categories, which is hard and not creative.

q: what kind of markup does the wiki system use?

 This is a plain text type of markup, which is minimalistic.
 This is supposed to be more pleasant than the standard
 wiki markup. both to read and to write. If you look at the
 text files you should see the style of markup.

q: Is it possible to change the syntax for the markup?

 Probably but it is not simple at the moment.

q: What other documents are available?

 There is a brief faq in the top level directory which is
 called the bumble-faq.html  That file describes the overall
 bent of this site.

q: How can I use the code in this directory?

 The main purpose of this code is transforming text documents
 into html. It does this by parsing the text document
 according to certain structures. For example a title of
 a document may look like this ** The page title **
 The code recognises this as a title if it occurs as the first
 thing on the page and creates a Title object which it
 inserts in an FaqDocument object or some other Document object
 To use the code you could type
   java FaqDocument document.txt > document.html
 since the FaqDocument class contains a main method which
 outputs the appropriate html. Or you could use the FaqDocument
 class in some java code.

q: What does the code [ dir] mean?

 This code instructs the transforming engine to insert a
 directory listing in the outputted html document. Actually
 there is no space between the opening bracket and the 'dir'
 text. The directory listing is the listing of a directory
 on the computer where the transformation engine is run,
 which would usually be the web-server.

q: How do I write an faq document?

 Look at the file which has the same name as this one but
 which has the file name ending '.txt'. This will show
 you the syntax required for writing an faq document such
 as this one. There is very little syntax required, just
 a start and end tag and a question beginner and a question
 ender (question mark).

q: why is the faq a popular format?

 because it has overtones of the dialog, in a socratic sense.

q: what is the /edit/ directory?

 this directory contains the beginnings of a text editor
 written in java. The editor is orientated towards saving
 on a ssh server via sftp. this is mainly because this is
 the only way to save to the source forge server.

q: Can I use lists in documents?

 In theory yes. For example

  o- here is the first item
   - and the second
   - view the text file
   - for the text format to use
   - at the moment there are no links in lists
   - last item. A blank line ends the list.

  u- or an unordered
   - list is ok too
   - the last item

 But whether they work I dont know


 [/faq]