About

W2ML.com provides software products, documentation, and support for W2ML, the Web 2 Markup Language. W2ML is an XML-based markup language, designed to make the World Wide Web natively read/write by adding content management features to XHTML™ web pages.

About W2ML.com

W2ML.com provides software products, documentation, code samples, and support for W2ML. The main software product is mod_w2ml, an Apache module implementing a W2ML processor. The documentation includes many examples and the W2ML Specification. Support is provided through forum and email. W2ML.com is run by Marc Mongenet, creator of W2ML.

About the Web 2 Markup Language

The Web 2 Markup Language (W2ML), is an XML-based markup language. It is designed to make the World Wide Web natively read/write by adding content management features to XHTML™ web pages. Its main feature is to allow online structured WYSIWYG edition of web pages. It is server-side processed and requires no browser plugin. It is fully file-based and requires no database.

To avoid being tied to a specific implementation, W2ML preserves as much as possible the declarative nature, the simplicity, and the portability of HTML. It does not try to be a general-purpose programming language, and it lets the implementation of business specific features to other languages like PHP and Java™.

W2ML is open and its documentation is publicly available. Everybody may write a W2ML processor and distribute it; everybody may write W2ML applications and distribute them.

W2ML is designed and developped by Marc Mongenet. A first draft called WMML for WebMaster Markup Language was published on the Web in 2006. But in 2007 it was renamed Web 2 Markup Language to reflect the broad goal of the language.

About mod_w2ml

W2ML.com provides the mod_w2ml W2ML processor. It is a module for the Apache HTTP Server. The mod_w2ml module is freely available for development and evaluation. W2ML.com sells License keys for production use. This module is currently the only available W2ML processor.

The mod_w2ml is distributed with an online WYSIWYG editor that works with Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox, with partial support in Opera and Safari.

About Marc Mongenet

Before working full-time on web technologies and W2ML, Marc Mongenet worked during 6 years as a software development engineer. He started his professionnal life by working one year on the optimization of the MPEG-4 video codec. Then, he worked on entreprise-level applications, mostly electronic documents content management in finance, public administration, defense, and health. During is career, he wrote and maintained softwares in many languages, including: C, C++, Java, Perl, Ada, Awk, Tcl, JavaScript, XSLT, (X)HTML, CSS, and shell scripts. He worked on Windows (3.1, NT, 2000), Linux (Slackware, Red Hat, Debian), AIX, HP-UX, Solaris, and the VMS operating systems. He integrated several software products, among them Vignette, Oracle, SAP, Apache, and MS Office.

Marc Mongenet has a diploma in computer science from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology at Lausanne, Switzerland, and lives in the French-speaking part of Switzerland, near Geneva. He is an active member of Wikipedia, the Groupe Romand des Utilisateurs de Linux et de Logiciels Libres (GULL), and SwissWeb2.0.

About the Read/Write Web

The idea of writable web pages is as old as the World Wide Web.1 The very first web browser was also able to edit web pages.2 But edition was not integrated to the next successful browsers: NCSA Mosaic and the first releases of Netscape Navigator. While multiple web editors like Golive, Composer, Frontpage or Dreamweaver were later developed, and multiples technologies like WebDAV, AJAX and online editors (with designMode and contentEditable) were invented, online edition never became a common standard integrated feature of the web. But the vision of a web as a creative space where every visitor may read as well as write pages never ceased; it is often called the Read/Write Web.3

The Read/Write Web is still in construction: the desire to let people edit web pages has fueled the creation of thousands of web content management systems (Web CMS), and a lot of specific softwares like guestbooks, forums, wikis, and blogs. These tools let visitors add content to pages, user-generated content, and give a new face to the web, called Web 2.0.4

References

  1. The World Wide Web was invented in 1989-1990 by Tim Berners-Lee.
  2. The first web browser, which really was a browser-editor, was the WorldWideWeb browser on NeXT computers.
  3. See Berners-Lee on the read/write web BBC interview (9 August 2005) for more insight into the read/write web.
  4. In fact, Web 2.0 is mostly a very successful buzzword. See the Web 2.0 Wikipedia article for more meanings and references.

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