Re: HtmlGenerator will improve in next version?

> 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.

Seems to me you could fix that problem, and a few others as well, by
creating a standard DocumentObject type that had Element and Entity
types corresponding to SGML elements and entities, and represented
in memory in their logical structure--i.e., Element type would be
a Vector of attributes and a Vector of sub-elements, Entity would be
just type and data.  You could write filters that dealt with the
actual structure that way, and have one at the client end that just
traversed the structure to output HTML (perhaps even letting you
choose what kind of HTML to output for different clients).

Since SGML already specifies the structure, it should be pretty
straightforward to implement that in Java, but you'd have to
standardize the interface for it to be really useful (e.g., in
editing tools, search engines, converters, etc.)

HTML itself, then, would serve two purposes--storage format on
the server, and communications format to the client.  Everything
else would be done in-memory with the tree-structured class.

--
Lee Daniel Crocker <lee@piclab.com>

Received on Thursday, 15 August 1996 19:28:18 UTC