BML is a client based markup standard designed to provide a set of routines and properties in order to accomplish a series of tasks through a dedicated software runtime. It's inspired by YAML to keep things simple and human readable. It's client based and entirely depends on the software it runs from. It can be extended via a scripting language to extract complex resources. You could apprehend it as the opposite of a traditional markup language like XML or HTML that provides the final output for a given task.
BML gives you a high level description of all the steps necessary for a given software to obtain the desired output. So it contains intelligence and logic while depending on a comprehensive software to be run. It's very simple to read and easy to learn, so that most educated people can have access to it, understand what it does and improve it to fit their expectations. It's like a blueprint as opposed of being a simple output or a comprehensive source code.
BML is a dedicated language meaning it has to be extended with a concrete scenario in mind. For instance the VBML is a BML based language that provides direct access to video resources on the Internet.
It's often a good practice to prefix BML with an explicit letter that defines the expected scenario when parsing and running its content. That's useful for defining a constrained scope and being efficient at a given task, it's also easier to guess what it might do without extracting the content itself.
Which makes it substantially different than other standards like linked data which proposes to interlink generic data. BML is deeply singular and specific about a set of given tasks it's trying to achieve efficently. It's also constrained and finite, which gives it a peculiar philosophical stance.
BML comes with a simple and high level scripting language. It's based on a very simple syntax with a focus on efficiency and simplicity. It enables the user to specify a set of routines and properties according to what he wants to achieve with his program. It's entirely sandboxed meaning it should not make a program crash no matter what the user writes in the BML input.
The scripting language is simple enough and could be used with a rudimentary knowledge about coding practices. Which is supposed to empower end users to do more with their sofware, without learning a comprehensive programming language.
This standard was designed based on my practical experience at extracting video resources on the Internet. Which requires dedicated scripting together with a client based software that retrieves video resources on the Internet. It was intially designed with a Video Browser in mind (like MotionBox). Then came the idea of having a base standard that would allow other scenarios that are not necessarily related to video. For instance MBML for music or EBML for ebooks.
# BML 1.0.0
string: Hello World
ROUTINE: |
SET count 41
RETURN (ADD count 1)
- duckduckgo.vbml: DuckDuckGo video search engine.
- bittorrent.vbml: BitTorrent video retriever.
- youtube.vbml: Youtube video retriever.
- opensubtitles.vbml: OpenSubtitles subtitles retriever.
- tmdb.vbml: TMDB cover retriever.
- Benjamin Arnaud aka bunjee | [email protected]