The Website META Language (WML) is a programming language created by Ralf S. Engelschall to build HTML code - thus a metalanguage (see ). It provides a convenient way to create and maintain complex static web sites (as opposed to the dynamic Web sites we'll create later with , , , , etc.). It's especially useful for maintaining a consistent look and feel across the Web site. As such, it's a step up from plan HTML for building a web site, and is easier to use and less complex than the dynamic web tools we'll study in later chapters.
If your site serves up a large number of static web pages, with WML you can change all the pages by changing one template and then executing a make-like command. Another advantage of using WML is that after compilation, there's no more server-side processing; in contrast, the dynamic languages we'll discuss later have to be executed on the server when they are called. In addition, with WML the client-side browser gains a speed advantage from being able to cache the static pages.