Robert Cummings wrote:
On Tue, 2009-01-13 at 18:18 -1000, Daniel Kolbo wrote:
Phpster wrote:
What about stripping out all the 'nuances' and just reducing it to
just the text where you then control the display and using your
templates and css?
Bastien
Sent from my iPod
On Jan 13, 2009, at 9:49 PM, Daniel Kolbo <kolb0057@xxxxxxx> wrote:
Hello,
I've been using PHP and Smarty for several years now and I am happy
with this "division" of data from presentation. With this philosophy
in mind, i am a bit perplexed as to how to handle the text on my
sites. That is, the text is data, so i am motivated to store the
text in a database, files, or the like, but then text is loaded with
little markup nuances (random italics/weight/colors, etc...) that
make template design rather ugly. This motivates me to put markup
(maybe even my own brand of markup) around the text, and to store
this markup-text combination in a database. But I don't like this
either, because a lot of the people writing the content/text know
word/writer not markup. So i am motivated to have them save their
text as .html, and I parse this file and modify accordingly.
However, i don't like this either as not all word/writer styles are
1-to-1 with CSS. Without any options I am back to thinking "hard
code" the text with markup in included templates, but it hurts just
thinking of updating/modifying.
I have looked (briefly) at Web Content Management Systems, but this
seems like overkill really, maybe i'm ignorant.
What would the community suggest? The text can take on many forms,
introduction text, about text, product information, articles, blurbs,
(some changes daily, some doesn't) etc...where does all this text
live in 'properly' designed site.
Thanks in advance,
dK
Hello Bastien,
The difficulty with implementing your suggestions is that say in a
paragraph of text that has random bold or italics (etc...) (as
determined by the one drafting the text), how would i recover these
bold/italics if i remove them?
Strip all tags except bold and italics. Then replace <b> with <strong>
and <i> with <em> since the former tags are deprecated. If semantic
meaning is not intended by <b> and <i> then replace with <span
class="bold"> and <span class="italic"> and create those CSS styles.
Cheers,
Rob.
Yes, okay, but who is putting the tags there in the first place? The
writers who are drafting these in word/writer are not marking them
up...So say I put tags around the required items, then when the writer
goes to edit, they are going to say "what is all this", it is not a
'seamless' division. I am really looking for a three fold division, 1)
Logic/data, 2) presentation, and 3) text. Just like the logic side
doesn't concern itself with presentation, I'd like the writers to not be
concerned with presentation/markup either (except for using the styles
available in word/writer).
It seems a bit tricky...the writer is providing the data without PHP
knowledge and some styles without Smarty knowledge. The question is how
does one bridge this strange gap in a manageable and easily scalable way?
dK
