I quite agree - the proliferatoin of proprietary solutions is a little
annoying.
In my opinion, tempaltes offer a very clean solution. They have one
problem - it is hard to deal with dynamic elements like talbes or lists
when you use templates.
The solution we are currently trying for this is the following:
Use tempaltes, and when you need to use a dynamic element like table,
insert some "placeholeder" into your HTML instead of the table that will be
substituted later. Then use something to dynamically generate the table
(we currently use the W3C DOM library). After the table is generated,
replace the "placeholeder" with the generated table.
Any comments on this approach?
George Svedloff
Informix Software, Inc.
At 04:22 PM 5/17/99 +0200, Carlos Amengual wrote:
>Danny Ayers wrote:
>>
>> Hi,
>> I'm sure most programmers would agree that hardcoding and templates each
>> have their place. One thing that does irritate me though is how systems
>> for templates (not just for Java/HTML) keep appearing that require the
>> user to learn proprietary techniques, usually scripting languages. All
>> are offered as timesavers, 'no hardcoding required' being the selling
>> point. Well, I wouldn't have to do any Java hardcoding if I'd bothered
>> to learn Perl & PHP scripting...
>
>I agree with you. My approach has been to even avoid proprietary tags in
>the HTML, and do all the programmatic manipulation from Java. This
>leaves many unsolved problems, however, as in HTML you don't have an
>universal way to locate by name individual tags, and relative addressing
>workarounds -as I did- are easily broken. And if you want to insert, for
>example, a table into the document, you must put the formatting of the
>individual cells into the Java program.
>
>My solution to this was to use XML instead of HTML, and use style sheets
>to do the final graphic rendering. The problem is that these style
>sheets are still too obscure for the graphic designers to work with. I'd
>like to hear other people's experience with the deployment of XML as an
>HTML substitute.
>
>
>Carlos
>
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