What You Need to Know Before You Proceed
Making dialog boxes using web panels is a powerful, new feature in Maya 6 that will appeal most to MEL scripters who already know the tools and techniques to build web pages. If you are not familiar with web authoring, you may find it easier to use Maya's built-in user interface commands.
For this chapter, you should know how to make a simple web page using Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), what Uniform Resource Locators (URLs) are and how they are formatted, and how to create dialog boxes in MEL as presented in the last few chapters.
Example 1 later in this chapter will make more sense if you are familiar with JavaScript, a simple language originally implemented by Netscape that allows scripts to be embedded within HTML web pages. Even if you do not know JavaScript, though, it may give you an idea of what learning JavaScript might enable you to do.
If these concepts are not familiar, the section entitled Learning Web Authoring, below, suggests some sources for information about how to learn the skills you need.
Note: You must run Maya 6.0 or later to use the techniques in this chapter, as they rely on features not available in earlier Maya versions.
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