13. WML Template and Menu

In this section, we will introduce to you a new WML tag -- <template>. It is used to apply <do> and <onevent> elements to all cards in a deck. (We will discuss the <onevent> element in detail when we cover events later in this WML tutorial.)

In many web sites, the most commonly used links are grouped together in a menu and placed on the left side or at the top of the web pages. Users can navigate between the web pages conveniently with such kind of menu.

In WML, we can use the <do> element to create similar menus, which contain the most important and commonly used links of a mobile Internet site. What we need to do is to make the <do> elements accessible on all cards. One way is to include the same <do> elements in every card, like this:

Obviously, the above way has many drawbacks. For example, it increases the size of the WML document rapidly and thus increases the download time. Also, if we want to change the menu, we need to make changes to every WML card.

A better way is to define deck-level <do> elements using the <template> element. Deck-level <do> elements are enclosed within <template></template>. WAP browsers will apply the <do> elements in a template to all cards in a deck.

With the <template> tag, the previous WML markup can be rewritten as follows:

You can override a <do> element of a template by defining another <do> element with the same name attribute value in a WML card.

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