[alicebot-archcomm] What is a steammachine?

[Ernest Lergon]

AIML is not a HTML-template system:

COLDfusion makes me shiver as well as Dreamweaver, Frontpage etc. I
often had to deal with horrible HTML code created by those applications
used by mouse hustlers (ten-fold nested <table> i.e.). After replacing
it with a sane mod_perl template system or even with hand crafted SSI
pages my customers were happy.

<aiml:template> is just the (maybe unluckily chosen) name of the element
holding the answer of the bot - it could have been also named i.e.
<reply>. Maybe Dr. Rich can say something about why this name was selected.

On the other hand you could always embed HTML-, VoiceXML- or
ColdFusion-tags in a <template>, provided, you pipe the output to an
adequate post-processor - webbrowser for HTML, TTS-engine for VoiceXML
or CF-server - and use an AIML interpreter capable of handling namespaces.

Namespace:

The prefix 'CF' of Coldfusion tags has nothing to do with namespace. If
you really want to embed CF tags in AIML, you can do this already
(although a DTD/schema for CF is missing AFAIK) - e.g.:

<aiml version="1.01"
    xmlns="http://alicebot.org/2001/AIML"
    xmlns:aiml="http://alicebot.org/2001/AIML"
    xmlns:html="http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40"
    xmlns:vxml="http://www.w3.org/2001/vxml"
    xmlns:cfml="http://www.macromedia.com/CFML">

<category>
    <pattern>HTML OUTPUT</pattern>
    <template>
    <html:p>This is a chapter and <html:b>this is bold</html:b>.</html:p>
    </template>
</category>

<category>
    <pattern>VOICE OUTPUT</pattern>
    <template>
    Let's take a minute's silence. <vxml:break time="60s"/>
    <vxml:prosody volume=""x-loud">This is loud.</vxml:prosody>
    </template>
</category>

<category>
    <pattern>CF OUTPUT</pattern>
    <template>
<cfml:CFINVOKE COMPONENT="browser"
   METHOD="IsIE"
   RETURNVARIABLE="result_ie"/>
<cfml:CFINVOKE COMPONENT="browser"
   METHOD="IsNetscape"
   RETURNVARIABLE="result_ns"/>
<cfml:CFOUTPUT>
Your browser is:<html:BR/>
IE: #YesNoFormat(result_ie)#<html:BR/>
NS: #YesNoFormat(result_ns)#<html:BR/>
</cfml:CFOUTPUT>
   </template>
</category>

</aiml>

> [AIML interpreter overview]
>
See http://aiml.info/modules.php?name=Content&pa=showpage&pid=11

Ernest

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