On Mon, Jan 12, 2009 at 12:04:15AM -0500, John Corry wrote:
> One of the best things that ever happened to me (with regards to
> writing PHP) was deciding not to embed it in HTML anymore.
>
> I either:
> a) generate the HTML from classes I've built (HTML, Forms, Tables,
> Images, etc) or use an equivalent PEAR class
>
> - or -
>
> b) Use Smarty templates...in which I still generate the HTML that will
> go to the template (where required) with the HTML generation classes.
>
> The advantages are abundant.
>
> I can't imagine having to maintain some of the code I saw in the
> examples above. My favorite WTF was with this snippet:
>
> $imgHTML = '<img src="' . $url . '" alt="' . $alt . '" title="' . $alt
> . '" class="' . $imgclass . '" />';
>
> Holy crap...REALLY!?
>
> All that string concatenation and there's not even width/height
> attributes in there!
>
> That would look like:
>
> $i = new Image('path/to/image/file');
> $i->__set(array('class'=>$imgClass, 'alt' => $altText));
> $i->toHtml();
>
> Being able to change every image tag in a site by editing the
> class/method that created is just too big an advantage not to use. Not
> to mention the auto-generated width/height attributes, the ability to
> auto-produce thumbnails and fullsize images from a single file...
>
> After struggling through the beginnings, I wrote classes to generate
> basic HTML elements, then tables, then forms, then images.
>
> It saved me a bunch of time and taught me to see the website as an
> application...not as a web-page with pieces of data in it.
>
> Somehow, coming to that bit of knowledge was very helpful to my life
> as a programmer.
I've written a lot of code like the original example above, and still
do, but I see your point, since I've written code like yours too. I
write all my PHP code (and I write a *lot* of it) solo, with no help and
no collaborators. But as I understand it from a lot of framework types,
the ideal is to set up the HTML so that a HTML coder can understand
what's going on, without having a lot of PHP weirdness in it. Meaning,
if you're going to infuse your HTML with PHP, you should do it in a
minimalistic way. It'd be a helluva lot easier on me to do it all
through PHP classes, though.
I also come from a C background, and I recognize significant differences
between the paradigm for C programs and HTTP-based coding. Considering
that every PHP "program" paints generally a single page, I'm not a fan
of loading up 14 support files every time I load a page of HTML. That's
why I don't use one of the MVC frameworks available in the FOSS world.
CodeIgniter, which is one of the lightest weight frameworks, opens
something like 17 files before it paints a single byte in the browser.
The upshot is that I don't like to use a lot of libraries scattered in a
variety of files to render HTML/PHP pages.
But here's a question for those of you who work in a collaborative
environment-- are you really ever in a situation where some HTML weenie
is coding HTML pages and you're somewhere else doing the PHP work? Or is
that some academic's view of the way things *should* be done?
Paul
--
Paul M. Foster
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