From: dejaspam@... (Bill Atkins)
Date: 2004-04-15T03:04:16+09:00
Subject: New HTML Toolkit

I was thinking today about how much I hate writing programs to
generate HTML, so I sat down and wrote some code.  There's currently
nothing to make this work - it's just an idea

# tests a simple HTML generation toolkit - this is how a working
script ought to work

data = [[1, 2, 3], [4, 5, 6]

puts RHTk.new do
	title "A Test of RHTk - The Ruby HTML ToolKit"
	include_css "style/rhtk.css"
	body do
		header1 "Here's a sample header", :class => 'modern'
		table do
			name "main table"
			data.each do |i|
				row do
					data[i].each do |d|
						column d
					end
				end
			end
		end
		out "that's all for now"
	end
end

The RHTk constructor would return a string, all neatly tabified.

<html>
	<head>
		<title>
		<link rel="stylesheet" href="style/rhtk.css">
	</head>
	<body>
		<h1 class="modern">Here's a sample header.</h1>
		<table>
		<!-- main table begin -->
			<tr>
				<td>
					1
				</td>
				<td>
					2
				</td>
				<td>
					3
				</td>
			</tr>
			<tr>
				<td>
					4
				</td>
				<td>
					5
				</td>
				<td>
					6
				</td>
			</tr>
		<!-- main table end -->
		that's all for now
	</body>
</html>

The generation wouldn't necessarily be sequential.  The title and name
methods would store attributes and then everything would be converted
to a string at once.

I'd also like to add some kind of system for dealing with sessions and
forms.  Possibly incorporating Borges into this would be a good idea.

I know that CGI.rb has something similar to this, but I'm intending
this to be a whole framework, rather than just some HTML generation
routines.

Any thoughts on this?

Bill Atkins