How WEBBOT Syntax Works

Designer HTML is built on the foundation of the WEBBOT pseudo-tag that we have used since FrontPage 1.0 to implement our FrontPage components. This specially formed WEBBOT tag is placed inside of an HTML comment tag, so that web browsers simply ignore the information contained in the pseudo-tag, while FrontPage can parse the WEBBOT comment tag and use the information to provide a WYSIWYG authoring environment for that portion of the HTML.

Spanning WEBBOT syntax takes the syntax we used for a few WebBot components in FrontPage 1.1, and uses this syntax for all FrontPage components in FrontPage 97, FrontPage 98, and FrontPage 2000. We use the

 <!-- WEBBOT StartSpan -->

syntax for starting the component declaration, and we add a

 <!--WEBBOT EndSpan -->

closing tag. This allows us to put our special WebBot attributes inside the comment, while also producing HTML that is readable by any browser.