HtmlGenerator will improve in next version?

HI,

I was thinking what non-obvious areas could be in Jigsaw that (IMHO) should
be improved and I came up with one, nobody mentioned anything about before.

Currently, generation of HTML is very primitive, program has to supply all
tags and content, so creating of structured page on the fly is a bit of a
pain and even where there is some code for creating a page as a collection
of elements (in w3c.jigsaw.forms), those elements are not reusable or
reparsable.

I am perfectly aware, that nice facilities for HTML creation is by far not
the most important area of WebServer. However, I was thinking :-}.

Jigsaw is very dynamic and there would be a number of resources soon
generating complex html on the fly a probably some filters, that would like
to parse that html and/or add some content/metas/etc... Currently, the only
way to do is to openStream, reparse it into new HtmlGenerator and setStream
back. IMHO, it would be much easier if is was possible to modify html page
in place while it is still kept as a collection of objects. Conversion of
the tree representing the html page into the text stream which is the final
html page would be done by Reply when it is emitted.

A simple example. A postable resource would be able to keep some half built
form as a collection of elements and, depending on interaction with a
client, set or reset some fields.

All of this is just my thinking and I hope somebody can add arguments for
or against this. I know that complexity of the code to write may not be
worth number of times this code would be needed :-{, but I hope advantages
would be prevailing :-}.

Opinions?
     Alex.

Ps. As my subject line shows, I am actually hoping that maybe some of the
work is already planned into coming release, but even if it is, it would be
good idea to discuss possibilities and problems on this list.

alex@access.com.au

Received on Thursday, 15 August 1996 03:00:17 UTC