Garret: I have the same sentiments. I'm very new to Wicket and Java as well. So a lot of wicket's ways seem quirky to me; but there are a lot of nice things done here: models, behaviors.
I'd love to modernize wicket in markup generation. One of which I'd like to suggest use of handlebars/mustache-like templating. If that interests anyone, I'd like to hear their thoughts. I've created my first Wicket issue here: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/WICKET-5638 I as well am very willing to contribute. Just learning the ropes! Thanks. - Chris Lee -----Original Message----- From: Garret Wilson [mailto:gar...@globalmentor.com] Sent: Thursday, July 10, 2014 5:31 PM To: dev@wicket.apache.org Subject: EXTERNAL: the dangers of Wicket's modifying given HTML Everyone, Wicket was created in a world in which little was done at display time to manipulate the HTML DOM tree, so Wicket felt like it had free reign to muck around with the HTML given by the developer. But in today's world in which we use JavaScript libraries like jQuery to modify the DOM on a whim, and CSS libraries such as Yahoo! Pure to provide styling, Wicket's modification of the HTML I give it can wreak havoc with my application. 1. Let me give you two examples. The first is BookmarkablePageLink. I have a simple and semantically useful navigation: <nav> <ul> <li><a wicket:id="homePageLink" ... I throw in a couple of CSS classes from Yahoo! Pure CSS Library, and it turns into a beautiful menu with mouseover highlighting, selected items, etc. I use a BookmarkablePageLink to wrap each link. But some menu items are only available to users with certain permissions, so I want to disable some of them. Oops! When I call BookmarkablePageLink.setEnabled(false), the HTML changes! Suddenly my <a> tags are turned into ugly <span><em> tags, completely destroying the look of the menu because Yahoo! Pure CSS doesn't recognize <span><em> tags as menu items. Sure, I can call getMarkupSettings().setDefaultBeforeDisabledLink(...) and friends, but I shouldn't have to. This is a holdover from the days when stylistic changes were made by changing the HTML, not by applying CSS. I recommend that by default links should not change the HTML, but instead add or remove a particular HTML class value. 2. The second example is CheckBoxMultipleChoice. I have a nice set up checkboxes in the HTML: <div wicket:id="widgets"> <label for="foo"><input id="foo" type="checkbox"/> Foo</label> <label for="bar"><input id="bar" type="checkbox"/> Bar</label> </div> Without Wicket, those look nice; they are displayed horizontally, and the labels are beside the checkboxes: X Foo X Bar But if I use CheckBoxMultipleChoice, it completely screws up the HTML! Suddenly my HTML looks like this: ...<input .../><label ...>foo</label><br/><input .../><label ...>bar</label><br/> Wicket has not only taken my <input> out of the <label>...</label>, it has added an ugly, non-semantic <br/> for styling. Why?? If I wanted to style my HTML with <br/> (like I did around the year 1997), then I would have put it in the original HTML myself! And by taking the <input> out of the <label>, they are no longer a unit, and because of my CSS styling the labels now appear under the checkboxes---not to mention that Wicket has forced my checkboxes to be vertical instead of horizontal via the <br/>. Yes, I realize I can call CheckBoxMultipleChoice.setSuffix(), but again, I shouldn't have to. It turns out that for the moment I will have to abandon CheckBoxMultipleChoice altogether and do everything manually. Yes, I know I can "remedy" much of this manually by adding lots of boilerplate/setup code to what comes out of the box by default, turning off auto-generation of "<em>" and "<br/>", etc. But that's one of the shortcomings of Wicket right now---to get it work like one would expect it to in the modern world of HTML5 and CSS3, one has to add lots of boilerplate code to change its defaults. Wicket was made to prevent boilerplate code. In summary, I'd like to encourage the developers going forward to tweak Wicket so that it doesn't change our HTML too much, it doesn't require us to "undo" the HTML that it forces on us, and plays much better in the modern world of HTML5, CSS3, and Ajax. And I'll be glad to help make that a reality! Best, Garret
