From: dblack@...
Date: 2002-08-11T11:21:16+09:00
Subject: Re: extend Html4?

Hi --

On Sun, 11 Aug 2002, Harry Ohlsen wrote:

> > I'm not quite following.  Do you mean this specifically in relation
> > to the design of cgi.rb?
>
> Sorry, I should have been clearer.  The original issue that was mentioned
> (assuming I didn't come into the thread too late) was that if one does
> something like:
>
>    require 'cgi'
>    include CGI::Html3
>
> this makes the module-level method available without specying the "namespace",
> so that you can do things like:
>
>    puts html { h1 { "Hello, world!" } }
>
> but that then the DOCTYPE specification doesn't end up in the output.
> Instead, one sees something like
>
>    <html><h1>Hello, world!</h1></html>
>
> I thought people were saying the reason for this was that the DOCTYPE stuff
> only happens if one constructs a new CGI instance in the code.
>
> What I meant was that if the construction of that object has the side-effect
> of setting up some infrastructure, then that infrastructure could,
> potentially be set up as top-level code.

That is what we were talking about, but it's all based on trying to do
an end pass around the official API, so it's not something that I
would really recommend being changed in cgi.rb :-)

By the way, I did figure out why the DOCTYPE declaration doesn't
appear: the factory-created #html method in a normal CGI object
actually gets overridden by an "extend HtmlExtension".  And, sure
enough, if you do:

  require './cgi.rb'
  cgi = CGI.new("html4")
  include CGI::Html4, CGI::HtmlExtension
  puts html { }

it does output the whole thing.  But until we hear otherwise, I would
assume this is all not guaranteed, as it's probing into the inner
workings of the extension.  (But quite interesting, isn't it? :-)


David

-- 
David Alan Black
home: dblack@candle.superlink.net
work: blackdav@shu.edu
Web:  http://pirate.shu.edu/~blackdav