Excuse a newbie if this has been discussed before, let me know in that case.
As I understand it, as of today the composer cannot really handle ASP,
JSP, PHP source. I think that since these kind of pages are really a
large and increasing part of the web content today, it would be
reasonable to take them into account.
All these kind of "languauges" extends HTML with blocks like / <%
code...%>/ which are converted to regular HTML at run-time on the server
side. This means that the composer must handle these blocks like a
"black box", more or less the way the "yellow markers" of today
represents unknown HTML tags.
The problems involved are, to my understanding:
* To handle the syntax. JSP uses blocks like/ <% code...%>/, ASP and
PHP has a similar syntax. Today, we read it but when saved the
block is converted to /<% code... %>>;/ which just does not
work. I've filed a bug 59985 concerning JSP about this.
* To display this kind of block in running text. Today, such a block
is represented by the "yellow markers". Although this works, I
think it would be a big advantage to use another colour, eg. red,
for this kind of "active code" which definitely is something else
than normal, unknown tags..
* To display a tag (i. e., an input field) which contains active
code. This might be something like/ <input type="text" size="<?
print $size? >" >/ . The only thing we could and should do is to
display the complete tag as some kind of "red box"; by definition,
we don't have sufficient information to render it.
Altogether, is this a fair description? Should we try to handle also
JSP, ASP and PHP files in the composer? My feeling is that we can get a
lot of usability for a limited amount of work - but I don't know the
code ;-) Also, this might help to make Mozilla popular among the people
which develops this kind of web pages which is obviously a Good Thing.
--michael
