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<( About )>
DML2 is an Open Source (released under the GNU GPL, see COPYING) effort by Deraj DeZine. As explained in the introduction, its purpose is to separate content from structure and presentation by storing it within custom DML2 objects. The object oriented approach makes splitting the content up rather simple, since you must only think of logical object types.
Before you say anything, yes, I have heard of XML. Unfortunately, I feel that XML is too interested in making XML usable by anyone for any purpose, thus leaving it bloated and confusing for the average user who does not need support for a million languages and character sets and such. Also, I am still unsure of XML's object-oriented-ness. It may be just me, but I could not figure out how to define an object type (such as what DML2 allows you to do) and then instantiate that definition.
From what I've heard, XSLT transformations can perform a task similar to DML2's render functionality, but I honestly could not find an implementation that would generate static pages (like what I need for this manual). Everything was a mod for Apache or something like that.
No matter what the validity of the above statements, XML scared me away. Scared me to the point that I decided to just roll my own. I like to think I've made a useful language, but only time (and user comments) will tell. In the future, I may implement a DML2 to XML converter, but I'm not sure how useful this would be.
If you have any questions, comments, or feature requests, head on over to Deraj DeZine and find my email (it's probably deraj at the server submail.net, but you may want to check that).
I hope DML2 is as useful to you as it is to me!
Lastly, a disclaimer: DML2 makes no claims to solve any problems or do anything productive. If it causes any problems (such as deletion of files and/or directories), I will not be held responsible.
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