Does using Tiles still makes sense in 2006? Please correct me if I am wrong, but if I understand correctly, main Tiles featurs are:
* Uniform L&F (block layout, colors, etc) * Tile definitions Uniform L&F ----------- The layout is defined in a layout file. Follows is the layout style pulled right from Tiles page [1]: <%@ taglib uri="http://struts.apache.org/tags-tiles"; prefix="tiles" %> <table border="2" width="300" bordercolor="Gray"> <tr> <td bgcolor="Blue"> <strong><tiles:getAsString name="title"/></strong> </td> </tr> <tr> <td><tiles:insert attribute="header"/></td> </tr> <tr> <td><tiles:insert attribute="body"/></td> </tr> </table> This antiquated sample does not promote good HTML design. It uses table instead of div or span elements, and it uses HTML attributes like "bgcolor". The concrete page would use code like this [1]: <%@ taglib uri="http://struts.apache.org/tags-tiles"; prefix="tiles" %> <tiles:insert template="layout.jsp"> <tiles:put name="title" value="This is the title." /> <tiles:put name="header" value="header.jsp" /> <tiles:put name="body" value="body.jsp" /> </tiles:insert> I still have to specify all these <tiles:put> tags that refer to particular header/footer files (Definition solves that, see below). What if instead of using <tiles:put name="header" value="header.jsp" /> one would use something like this: <div class="header"><jsp:include page="header.jsp" /></div> and would have an appropriate set of rules for "header" class in a CSS file? Would not it be the same without using Tiles layout file? Tile definitions ---------------- Specifying <tiles:put> tags that refer to particular header/footer files does not make a lot of sense, so Tiles allows to have definitions in a JSP file or in XML. If I have definition in a JSP file, I would include it with "include" directive. Again, what if a JSP file with definitions contained just a list of regular JSP includes for the header, menu and footer, and every include would be wrapped into a div or span with specific CSS id/class? Would not it be quite similar? So, the question I am asking: what are the real benefits of using Tiles if I use JSP includes + XHTML/CSS for layout/styling? Can most of Tiles features be implemented with XHTML/CSS? Michael. [1] http://struts.apache.org/struts-action/struts-tiles/examples.html --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
