On Fri, 28 Jan 2000, Gunther Birznieks wrote:
> This is not considered to be a replacement for embedded perl solutions right?
No, it is just that.
> It is just a better HTML parser using a visitor design pattern? and
> a faster parser than HTML::Parser?
The HTML Tree part is; but the Apache::HTML::ClassParser part
built on top of that was designed to replace embedded Perl
solutions because of the problems with them described on the
web site.
> Those are cool motivations, but it takes me a little while going through
> your web site to distill this down?
The site needs more work, granted.
> It's not precisely a dynamic web page generation tool if it is based off of
> parsing standard HTML documents.
I don't follow how you draw that conclusion. The technique
parses standard HTML documents into an intermediate form (DOM)
that can then be manipulated via the mod_perl layer.
> If you wanted to do the same thing you can do with something like PHP, you'd
> have to create some pseudo tags even if they were customized comment tags
> that are built to be recognized by the Perl objects implementing the visitor
> design pattern interface.
The entire point of my technique is so you don't have to invent
custom, nonstandard tags.
We have this problem in my company (and I'm sure it occurs in
others as well). Our web-dev guys use DreamWeaver to create
sexy pages. Previously, said pages must then be taked by
programmers and hacked inserting "magic strings" to later be
substitued for dynamic content; or embedding Perl code for the
same thing. This is a tedious process. The resultant file, no
longer pure HTML, is something that can not be read back into
DreamWeaver should the page need a tweak. Instead, the source
page must be modified all over again. This is a pain.
Hence my technique.
> Perhaps an example of some of the things you expect people to do with it
> (maybe some real world examples) would make it more concrete for me to deal
> with as an idea.
There's a quasi-real example given in the Apache mod_perl
documentation. When I get some time, I will add to the site.
- Paul
