some ramblings

BML Guide

The Berylium Markup Language is a powerful HTML replacement that allows you to insert formatting, links and other objects into the text you type on berylium sites. Learn it here.

If you already know how to use BML and just need a reference, try the BML Reference folder. If not, read on!


What Is BML?
BML is a set of special codes you can use on berylium sites to format text or insert objects into text. Because berylium uses display formats besides HTML (such as text), and for security reasons, HTML cannot be used within berylium objects. Also, HTML is time-consuming to type properly. Here is a more in-depth explanation.

BML is a bracketed markup language: it uses square brackets ([&]) to enclose commands, properties, and blocks of text, so that they look like: [command:property value;text]

Aggh! I didn't understand a thing you just wrote!
It's a lot simpler than it sounds. Let's say you want to make some text bold. The BML that you would type would be [bold-this is bold!] and it would end up looking like this is bold! on the page.

The equivalent HTML formatting would be this is bold!, which is pretty simple, but you have to use the shift key a lot. For a better example of how BML can simplify document creation, see below.


Another Example
Besides controlling font properties, BML allows you to easily insert other berylium objects into your documents. For instance, the format of the image command is [image:id;width,height;offset], where width and height are optional maximum sizes and offset is optionally left or right.

try the BML Reference folderSo the BML command [image:2;320,240;right] will insert the image with id=2 (which id can be found on the image view page), at a maximum size of 240x240, and to the right of the text it is typed before.

In the example above, the BML was typed at the beginning of the paragraph (before "So the BML command..."). The command was translated as 



   width='240' 

   height='151' 

   alt='image: Image Title' 

   title='Image Title' 

   align='right' 

   border='0'>
I think most people will find that BML is somewhat simpler to type than HTML.


Inserting Hyperlinks to other pages
To insert a plain, old-fashioned link to another webpage, use the link command:[link:http://somesite.com/url.htm;optional text of link] which will make a link like this: optional text of link. If you leave out the optional text, the URL will be used, like this: http://somesite.com/url.htm.

To link to a document or folder in the same berylium site, use a document or folder command:[document:id;optional text for link].

If you leave out the optional text in this command, the document title becomes the link. Here's an example of a link to document:3, which is the "Welcome" document: Hello There!.


Other BML Tricks
BML is used in berylium to insert some other special characters and formatting, as well. One example is the use of [copy:] to insert a copyright symbol (©). There are also power-user tags, such as the [code:][/code:] tag pair, which can be used to surround pre-formmatted text.

Finally, if you just plain want to put brackets around something, you can usually do so with no problems. However, if the text you bracket contains a colon (:), you may need to use the [bracket:text to be bracketed] command.


BML can be nested.
You can usually put bml commands inside of other bml commands and expect them to work right, although it's best to keep in mind that objects you insert (such as images) probably have their own links and font formatting. As a simple example,
[bold:Some things are bold [italic:and italic]!] will work just like you'd expect it to: Some things are bold and italic!


BML is expandable
And because BML is translated "on-the-fly", site administrators can fine-tune it as necessary. You can even say that when viewing a page as text, *bold looks like this*; and in HTML, bold looks like this.


Learning BML
Armed as you are with a general understanding of the concepts on this page, I now direct you to the folder, which has a detailed description of all the BML commands. (Although it's currently under construction so not really. -cs)

By Chris Snyder on July 8, 2002 at 5:39pm

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