In order to simplify the creation of reporting forms, or to create notebook entries with known structured entries (e.g. keywords for search), WWWeasel includes an extensible directory of HTML documents that are used as document templates when creating a ``new'' document. We believe this is an important feature for engineering notebook use because the engineer can set up a variety of template categories to help make the notebook entries consistent.
Template documents may contain an extensible list of special ``macro'' markup elements which dynamically expand themselves into other HTML when the document is published. These macros are just added to the template document (which is just an HTML file) and are interpreted by WWWeasel when writing out the HTML data. Macros included with WWWeasel include:
<D-USER></D-USER>'' -- Insert name of author.
<D-EMAIL-ADDR></D-EMAIL-ADDR>'' -- Insert E-Mail address of
author.
<D-DATE></D-DATE>'' -- insert time of publication.
<D-EXEC href="finger `whoami`"></D-EXEC>'' --
insert given Unix process output (in this case ``finger `whoami`'') at time
of publication.
Clearly, this mechanism could be extended to do, for example, a database query upon publication, which means that documents authored in this way can be somewhat active with respect to handling outside data.