View source for SoC Ideas WML Debugging

{{SoC2010Idea}}

==Description==

<h2>WML Debugging Support</h2>
Page for the idea: [[SoC_Ideas_WML_Debugging]]

Improve the ways to debug Wesnoth's domain-specific language, WML.

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== Background ==

Wesnoth Markup Language (WML) is used to create most kinds of Wesnoth content: campaigns, scenarios, and so forth. WML is a fairly powerful language, but its debugging features often make it difficult to debug. Incorrect WML typically results in cryptic error messages or unusual and difficult to understand misbehavior.

== Project ==

There are several possible steps in improving WML:

* ensuring that any WML error results in an accurate line number for the error being displayed. This will require modifying the WML pre-processing system to properly map all expanded macros to their original lines. 
* improving the quality of error messages: trying to map unterminated strings and tags back to their starting positions.
* schema system: a WML schema system would be developed which would enable WML documents to be validated to make sure they have correct attribute names with values that are formatted correctly.