WebStory Language Syntax

WebStory Engine games are written in xmugly, which is a nicer syntax for XML and stands for "XML less ugly".

Understanding xmugly syntax

Xmugly and XML share some concepts that you should be able to tell apart for understanding this documentation.

Elements and attributes

An element in xmugly looks like this:

. elementName attribute1 value1, attribute2 value2

An element starts with a dot and has a name (the elementName above) and zero or more attributes. Each attribute conists of a name and a value (e.g. attribute1 above is the name of the first attribute, and its value is value1). An element must always be on its own line and the first non-space character of this line must be a ..

Elements can also contain text and other elements. Let's look at an example. The following element parent contains some text This is text. as well as an element child:

. parent :
    This is text.
    . child
--

Notice that the parent has a colon (:) at the end of its line. This means that this element has some content. The end of the element's content is signaled by the -- (also on its own line).

Of course elements can have both attributes and content like in this example:

. parent name Mark, age 55 :
    . child name Max, age 18
--

Although the attributes of an element are separated by commas, an attribute value can also contain commas if you put it in quotes:

. element attr1 "foo, bar", attr2 val2

In this case, the first attribute is called attr1 and its value is foo, bar.

Special characters

In XML and therefore in xmugly, there are some special characters that cannot be used in some places. If you want to use such characters, you need to encode them, which means you have to replace what you actually want to write with something a little more cryptic.

The following is a list of all special XML characters and how to encode them:

Shorthand for attributes

Some attributes are used so often in story files that there's a shorter way to write them. The following is an element with all the shorthand attributes available:

. foo @marc, :200, #marcId, +create, -resize

This is the same as writing:

. foo asset marc, duration 200, id marcId, create yes, resize no

The following shorthand notations are available for attributes: