From: Peter Szinek <peter@...>
Date: 2006-12-17T19:51:47+09:00
Subject: Re: hpricot problem

Hello,

> Given this information,
> I will show you how to extract the desired content with a few lines of
> Ruby, no fuss, no undue complexity, no Hpricot.
Why should it be complicated? What fuss? Who needs few lines?   With the
current version of hpricot this is exactly one line:

doc//p[img]//text()

> This is a scene in a much larger play, one in which someone says, >
"Wow, I
> had no idea there was such a powerful library, so carefully designed,
 > so
> complete. But, notwithstanding its extraordinary features, > > > > > >
> notwithstanding
> the hundreds of man-hours expended creating it ... I can't get it to >
> do what I want."

You know, software is an evolving stuff. 3 (or 4, or something like
this) days ago the above stuff was not available in HPricot, and since
it was such a common query, and requested by people. voila: now it is
there.

Of course there will always be some missing features - no framework or
library can solve all the problems of all mankind - but after some time,
useful feedback (i.e. not 'forget about every framework since you can do
it in a few lines of Ruby' but rather feature requests, bug reports etc)
a framework can reach a maturity level where is solves most of the
problems of its users.

Btw. ever heard of 'reinventing the wheel'?

Also your (otherwise great) code snippets always assume that the
underlying HTML is well formed, and x and y and z - which is in real
life almost never the case. Of course the posters here are not pasting
200K of HTML against which they run they production code, but a few
lines of example which is usually an oversimplification of the problem.

This another point where such libraries are great: they handle 844747
special cases (if your case is not among them, see the current-2nd
paragraph, or add it there on your own) which is always a problematic
thing in case of hand written stuff.

I could state here 100 another points which would prove that in
production, libraries are almost always better choice over hand written
code on the fly - of course learning Ruby, playing with some features
etc is another thing. I am not arguing that in this case one should not
code everything on his own. However, there are some cases when people
need a stable, working solution for something and don't want to play
around with hand coded regexps against crappy HTML. In this case, IMHO,
using a framework is absolutely OK.

Cheers,
Peter

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http://www.rubyrailways.com















Best wishes,
Peter

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http://www.rubyrailways.com