On Tue, 19 Oct 2004 17:01:19 -0400, Kichline, Don (EM, PTL) <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Searching on the new groups, that is what I have been hearing... Unfortunately that > is not going to fly in this case. What I am proposing is a generic work around for > this problem that will not tie struts into any single-vendor specific attributes. > > Pass in a Properties class with key/value pairs into the tag. The tag will then > iterate through the Properties and output the pairs as attributes into the tag. >
I can appreciate your feelings on this ... but IMHO the proposed cure is worse than the disease. Allowing an open-ended mechanism like this abandons any hope of using an IDE to catch typos in attribute names, and just encourages the use of non-standard features of *all* browsers instead of just IE. You've also got to solve a technical issue of how to easily represent this in the JSP source code in order to make the solution work. I'd hate to see us have to go back to scriptlets and runtime just for this. > I would have to agree that supporting a propietary attributes would go against the > spirit of open source. On the other hand saying that you have to maintain your own > copy of the code does not do open source much good either. I believe a little > flexability in handling the attributes is in order. Remember that not everyone has > the ability to just throw away all vendor-specific items and go completely standard. > Honestly, the largest culprite here is time and money. Of course we don't have > enough of either. > > Thanks, > > Don Kichline > The option to take advantage of one of the liberties that open source provides you -- the ability to modify the code for your own use -- might still be a practical option. Who knows ... there might be enough other users with the same needs to support a SourceForge project around such a forked tag library. Side technical note -- if you decide to go this way, one other possibility would be to mandate JSP 2.0, so that you can use the new SimpleTag API to create tags that themselves accept arbitrary attributes ... then it's up to your tag implementation to decide what to do with them. An orthogonal issue that is important to your decision making processing is that the current Struts HTML tags are basically considered legacy by the Struts developers, and are unlikely to receive a lot of attention other than refactoring them a little so they can be released separately from the Struts core, and perhaps fixing a few bugs along the way. I would think twice about committing to new development, especially for large scale or long term projects, based on them -- whether or not they included the extra attributes for IE-specific behaviors. Craig --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
