As you may have seen this summer I'm working on making a CLI for the OSCAR 
Installer.  As I have moved into the configurator step (Step 2), I have run 
into a major problem.  HTML is very difficult to parse into a command line 
format.  Essentially what I have to do is write my own HTML browser to print 
the HTML and get responses from the users when there is an INPUT tag.  
Already this is a huge pain, but it gets worse as I start to try to parse the 
INPUT tags to create prompts.


For example, logically, to use a radio button, a label is necessary.  However, 
in HTML there is no way to connect a label to a button because the label 
could be to the left, right, above, or below the button.  Other problems 
arise when trying to connect things like checkboxes, which have no way to be 
tied together.


What I ask from you guys is to consider the possibility of converting the 
Configurator to use XML input files instead of HTML, i.e., configurator.xml 
instead of configurator.html.


Using XML would make solving all these problems much easier and allow me to 
get this CLI going by the end of the summer.  For the moment, the HTML (used 
by GUI) and XML (used by CLI) versions could coexist until a better solution 
(converting the GUI to XML, etc.) is realized.


I am told that these configurator files do not change very often, and it would 
not be a huge pain to maintain an HTML and XML version for a while especially 
since they are not very complex pages.


Please send me any input you have and keep an eye on the wiki page to keep up
with progress on the CLI.

Thanks,
Wesley

-- 
Wesley Bland
576-5508
[EMAIL PROTECTED]


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