Sam Tregar writes: >On 17 Jan 2002, William R Ward wrote: > >> That's a violation of the principle of separating HTML from code. >> What if the HTML designer decides to use a radio button group instead >> of a popup? > >Actually, I'd say that HTML is a violation of the principle of separating >design from programming. There's no clear separation between the >programmatic elements of the <form> tags and the layout of the <form> >tags. You'll have to draw the line somewhere - clearly the designer can't >be entirely in charge of form creation.
Why not? Most decent UI designers know how to set up list-boxes, checkboxes, radios, etc. as needed. It's not rocket science. But asking them to make a change to some Perl code is not reasonable. >I've found that in most cases the content of list-boxes is part of the >programming of a web app. If there is styling to be done then it's >usually just a matter of adding a css class attribute. Well, my experience differs. In my experience, the UI designer makes a mockup which includes dummy form elements but has the look that they want. I would then go through and convert the mockup into a template for them (mainly because <tmpl_loop> gives HTML people headaches). Then they can carry forward making changes to the template. >It's a balancing act and you have to weigh the pros and cons on each side. >It is certainly possible to produce a <select> element entirely inside the >template. What you end up with is a rat's nest of loops and conditionals. >Alternately you can give up a certain amount of flexibility in return for >vastly simplifying your templates. I generally choose the latter. Just about every HTML::Template app I've worked on has been a rat's nest of loops and conditionals, but that's pretty much unavoidable I think. For example, look at this page: http://airtel.cellmania.com/ Personally I can't stand the color scheme, but that's the customer's prerogative. The HTML structure is based on a template with several nested loops, and a correspondingly complex Perl function to structure the data accordingly. There's just no way to make a template for that page that isn't a rat's nest. When you've already got stuff like that, complicated loops and conditionals for a <select> tag is nothing. The advantage of all this is that you can have different versions of the site (http://m1.cellmania.com/ or http://orange.cellmania.com/ are more examples of this) that use the same Perl code with different templates to fit the desired look & feel. One customer might want a drop-down list, while another might want a list of radio buttons. If you do all the HTML in the template, you can make both of them happy with the same Perl code driving it. --Bill. -- William R Ward [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.wards.net/~bill/ ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
