Website Meta Language is a free

Free software

Free software, software libre or libre software is software that can be used, studied, and modified without restriction, and which can be copied and redistributed in modified or unmodified form either without restriction, or with restrictions that only ensure that further recipients can also do...

 and extensible web designer's off-line HTML

HTML

HyperText Markup Language is the predominant markup language for web pages. HTML elements are the basic building-blocks of webpages....

 generation toolkit for Unix

Unix

Unix is a multitasking, multi-user computer operating system originally developed in 1969 by a group of AT&T employees at Bell Labs, including Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Brian Kernighan, Douglas McIlroy, and Joe Ossanna...

, distributed under the GNU General Public License

GNU General Public License

The GNU General Public License is the most widely used free software license, originally written by Richard Stallman for the GNU Project....

 (GPL v2). It is written in ANSI C

ANSI C

ANSI C refers to the family of successive standards published by the American National Standards Institute for the C programming language. Software developers writing in C are encouraged to conform to the standards, as doing so aids portability between compilers.-History and outlook:The first...

 and Perl

Perl

Perl is a high-level, general-purpose, interpreted, dynamic programming language. Perl was originally developed by Larry Wall in 1987 as a general-purpose Unix scripting language to make report processing easier. Since then, it has undergone many changes and revisions and become widely popular...

 5, built via a GNU

GNU

GNU is a Unix-like computer operating system developed by the GNU project, ultimately aiming to be a "complete Unix-compatible software system"...

 Autoconf

Autoconf

GNU Autoconf is a tool for producing configure scripts for building, installing and packaging software on computer systems where a Bourne shell is available....

based source tree and runs out-of-the-box on all major Unix derivates.

WML consists of a control frontend driving up to nine backends in a sequential pass-oriented filtering scheme. Each backend provides one particular core language. WML additionally ships with a set of include files which provide higher-level features.

WML's nine backends are:

• Pass 1: Source Reading and Include File Expansion (ipp)
• Pass 2: HTML Macro Construct Expansion (mp4h)
• Pass 3: Perl 5 Programming Construct Expansion (eperl)
• Pass 4: M4 Macro Construct Expansion (gm4)
• Pass 5: Diversion Filter (divert)
• Pass 6: Character and String Substitution (asubst)
• Pass 7: HTML Fixup (htmlfix)
• Pass 8: Line Stripping and Output Fixup (htmlstrip)
• Pass 9: Output Splitting and Final Writing (slice)