Re: Tidy HTML source?

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At 11/29/2006 05:13 AM, Satyam wrote:
----- Original Message ----- From: "Paul Novitski" <paul@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
What I find to be a much greater problem is the human readability of logic code when HTML is mixed throughout. Your innovation is helpful here, as you're nearly making HTML tags into PHP key words, eliminating some of the literal quoting that makes PHP+HTML so tiresome. However, even with your pre-compiler the messy quotes are still there on the attribute level.

The value of the attribute is any valid PHP expression and if they are literal strings there will be quotes, but then, you can also use heredoc if, for example, you are putting some JavaScript code into an event. If the value is a numeric value, there is no need for any quotes at all. In the end, the value of an attribute is any valid PHP expression and it follows PHP rules.


XHTML, which I would hope you would lean toward in your pursuit of XML, does require quotes on all attributes:

        XHTML? 1.0
        4.4. Attribute values must always be quoted
        http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/#h-4.4

But it's not the quotes in the attributes I was referring to as messy, but instead the necessity for two sets of nested quotes when quoted expressions and concatenation syntax are contained within assignment statements.

I am an ardent user of heredoc exactly because it allows a level of separation of logic from markup, and at the same time permits embedded PHP variables. I use heredoc extensively for both HTML markup and SQL queries, both when they appear in my PHP scripts and when they imported from separate files.

By the way, I'm not expressing strong opposition to embedding PHP variables in HTML, as in:

        <a class="$sClass" href="$sBaseURL/$sPagename">$sCaption</a>

To my eye, this is a small step away from the more ideal:

        <a class="xxxxx" href="xxxxx">xxxxx</a>

where the attribute values and the content of plain old validatable HTML are replaced based on selectors.

Instead, what I'm objecting to are control structures, concatenation, mixed quotes, and escaped quotes fracturing the integrity of the output string.


And, stepping back, you're perpetuating the embedding of markup with logic so that it will still take a PHP programmer to modify the markup of one of your pages. Do you not see the advantage in separating the two layers?

Yes, I do, and I would recommend using templates or similar tools to provide for separation of code and markup, but sometimes there are reasons not to do so, for example, web services.

Please explain why you think web services promote mixing markup with logic.


I appreciate your comments and, I admit, my main purpose in doing this was to learn how to do it. I am an engineer and when I studied, a couple of semesters of Fortran IV was all I got (and punching cards at that, yes, I am that old), all the rest was self-taught so I wanted to go deeper into some aspects of computer science such as compilers (there is also a PHP grammar for JavaCC which I made earlier in the process).

Hah! Fortran on punch cards was my first computer language as well, back there in the Mesozoic. And writing compilers is the best fun. I like to view programming in general as language creation -- we create functions and objects as the key words in the custom language we use at the higher levels of our own scripts. Writing compilers seems like just an extension of that.


In fact, my original idea was some sort of embedded SQL as it exists for C, but I know it does not work quite Ok, in fact, it has been there for quite some time and it doesn't catch up. SQL is such a different kind of beast that it is hard to make it compatible. SQL cursors and error handling are concepts which are hard to blend into a procedural language so I believe it is better to handle SQL through functions where it is clearly separate from the language calling them. Thus, I thought, we have three main languages here, HTML, PHP and SQL. I know PHP and SQL don't mix well, how about the other end? That's when I started to think about this pre-compiler and found it to be a pretty logical mix.

That's interesting, I don't have a problem allowing PHP & MySQL to play together. I'm pretty happy with the PHP mysql function library in which the two communicate with strings and handles; and negotiation of SQL data structures maps nicely onto PHP logic blocks. Can you give an example of where you see the discord?

I try to separate the text of my SQL queries from my PHP logic in the same way that I try to separate PHP from HTML.

Warm regards,
Paul
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