From: Thomas Hurst <tom.hurst@...>
Date: 2002-11-09T23:26:26+09:00
Subject: Re: An alternative HTML generation syntax

* Philip Mak (pmak@aaanime.net) wrote:

> I'm using Ruby to output HTML a lot these days. I know of these
> methods:
>
> 1. Use CGI::Html4. Problem: Must use '+' all the time to join things.
> If I forget a '+', everything in the block before the '+' will get
> silently ignored since only the return value matters.

I don't like these "tags are methods", um, methods.  Frankly, they're
almost as bad as using puts() as far as seperating markup from content
generation.

I've written a lot of PHP template engines, and I've had some nice ideas
which PHP made quite difficult to implement; Ruby's flexibility could
make for some interesting engines, IMO.

Concider something like:

  t = FreakyTemplate.new('foo.tpl')
  t.head(:title => "Title", :author => "Me")
  t.body(:heading => "Article List")

  articles.each do |a|
      t.body.article(a)
  end

  print t

Using the template:

  <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
  <!DOCTYPE html
       PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
       "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
  <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" lang="en" xml:lang="en" >
  {block:head}
  <head>
    <title>{title}</title>
    <meta name="author" content"{author}" />
  </head>
  {/block}

  {block:body}
  <body>
    <h1>{heading}</h1>
    <div class="articlelist">
    {block:article(a)}
      <div class="article">
        <h2>{a.title}</h2><div class="author">By {a.author}</div>
        <p>{a.body}</p>
      </div>
    {/block}
    </div>
  </body>
  {/block}
  </html>

This closely mirrors an (unreleased) isotemplate engine I wrote in PHP.

-- 
Thomas 'Freaky' Hurst  -  freaky@aagh.net  -  http://www.aagh.net/
-
Woman:      "Is Yoo-Hoo hyphenated?"
Yogi Berra: "No, ma'am, its not even carbonated."