There are issues with DOM itself:
- it doesn't report line numbers for elements, so error messages
(other than parse errors) can't include them. Not very user-
friendly :(
It does! Just need to disable libxml error reporting, so no warnings
etc are generated, then pull the errors by hand.
But is there a way to get line number of any element if there were no
parse errors? Things like invalid TALES expressions need to report
line number, but aren't libxml's concern.
- non-validating parser can't support named entities (like ),
but users will expect them to work. Switching to validating parser
is not an option, because it will reject incomplete HTML fragments
and PHPTAL elements.
That is possible as well. Just need to tell DOM to resolve externals
and validate against them (= doctype). I think we can expect people
to write well-formed XML.
What DOCTYPE do you suggest? Document with XHTML DTD and TAL
attributes won't be valid, so something else is necessary.
- parser decodes numeric entities and represents them as literal
characters, possibly exposing encoding issues.
Eh? what do you mean. As long as the charset info is correct,
everything is fine.
I meant that if someone didn't care about encoding, but just used
named entities like £ would have to add/correct all necessary
declarations. It's not a big problem.
IIRC libxml will even read a charset value from a meta tag in an XML
document that it recognizes as XHTML.
Fortunately it does it only for HTML. XHTML user-agents must not read
charset from <meta> element.
On a different topic, I really think we should use this DOM parser
approach as the foundation for a completely new PHPTAL. There are
some things that I think would be worth changing, for instance we
should mandate the use of braces in function calls. That not only
allows passing of arguments properly, it also eliminates the need of
runtime evaluation of the type of the given element (array index,
object property, object method). Not sure why it is as it is right
now, but the "original" TAL uses braces for method calls, too, IIRC.
I'm pretty sure Zope's TAL does not require use of braces/parens. It
even has nocall: modifier that prevents automatic calling of
functions, which would be unnecessary if calls required special syntax.
However optional parentheses with arguments for function calls sound
like a good idea. This can be done without a complete rewrite of
PHPTAL :)
--
regards, Kornel
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