Abbreviated markup language is a language controlled by special characters. Special characters are ones that have an associated action. All other characters are considered normal. A sequence of normal characters makes up a word. Words have significance in that they can name a construct created by special characters.

AML, Abbreviated markup language is ideally a configurable language. One should be able to choose which special characters one wants to use, although certain sets of special characters wouldn't be helpful. (One that included { but not }, for example.)

General Types

Many special characters are used to enclose an area that is interpreted differently. There are two types of these, quotes and enclosings. Quotes have the same opening and closing character, while enclosings have separate ones. Each type of quote and enclosing has its own meaning.

The other special characters are more basic in nature, and have little meaning in themselves. These are the whitespace and escape character.

The AML translator is currently experiencing some difficulties with whitespace. For some reason it is padding words with tons of spaces. Luckily HTML ignores additional spaces. (Look at the source code.)

Special Character Listings

1. Literal quotes

   |, Anything enclosed in literal quotes is not interpreted by the translator, it is sent as is to the translated page.

2. Var quotes

   `, Text enclosed in var quotes is sent to the provider, to be filled up

3. Tag enclosing

   < and >, Text enclosed in here is the body of an html style tag. The preceding word to the opening tag tells the enclosing of its name.

4. Tag-head Enclosing

   [ and ], Text enclosed in here is within the head of an html-style tag. It is used to set attributes and to indicate a one headed tag.

5. Mold Enclosing

   { and }, A mold (aka template) is a chunk of aml that can be called by providers to fill their holes. (ha) An entire aml file is considered to be a 'root mold'.

6. Whitespace

   \t and \n and , Whitespace does not have any meaning of its own, but it is significant in the sense that it breaks up words.

7. Escape

   ~, Escape character ensures that the next character will be treated literally, and not interpreted. Escape is valid in all modes, even quotes.