From: patrick-may@... (Patrick May)
Date: 2002-03-21T08:43:55+09:00
Subject: Re: web templating for static sites?

Hi!

> How do you Ruby/HTML guys deal with the different versions of
> HTML and browsers? I would be interested in something that would
> take, e.g., a page of HTML4.01 with Style sheets and do a
> reasonable job of porting it backward to earlier standards and
> older browsers.  Of the Ruby HTML stuff in RAA, which would be
> the best place to start?

If you get a good page abstraction for your site, you can then have
methods like Page.to_pretty_html and Page.to_basic_html.  This assumes
that you can refactor your html into bits of content that can be
rendered in a 'pretty' and 'compatible' ways -- some content just
might not work.

On the other hand, most websites have a template that may use fancy
things, but the actual content is basic <p>, <b>, <i>, etc.

If this is a one off, you could might be able to mark the boundries of
the scary content by hand and then run a script to split it out for
older browsers.

Automatically reformatting existing html sounds like a very scary job.
 In fact, just the idea of *parsing* html scares me.  Overly forgiving
languages makes writing the parser unforgivable.

~ Patrick