SPUG: Perl and HTML
Showell30 at aol.com
Showell30 at aol.com
Tue Oct 24 10:59:17 CDT 2000
Since Jason has opened up the topic of Perl and HTML, I will throw my two
cents in.
I am working on a project where I have a bunch of web pages with
family/vacation photos that I need to tie together, giving them common
look-and-feel, common table of contents, etc.
I considered a template approach, and decided against it for a a couple
reasons:
1) If your template solution does not have an "include" feature, it can be
difficult to reuse HTML.
2) If you do use the "include" feature, you can quickly have a bunch of files
hanging around, which gets to be a mess after a while.
3) I've done template solutions before that were ugly (non-Perl, though).
4) I think of data first, presentation second, so templates just seemed wrong
for my coding psychology.
5) This is a personal project, so I can afford to be lazy and wrong about it.
;)
Anyway, I decided to use HTML::Subs and HTML::Entities instead. I have found
those to be very smooth sailing. Here is what I like:
1) Code is prettier -- no matching of start and end tags (although some would
argue matching parens is just as bad).
2) Reuse scheme is more Perlish to me. If I have a cool way of laying out a
table, I share it by making a subroutine to return the table widget, whereas
a template solution might lend itself to having an include file.
3) My approach does not preclude templates in the future. I do 90% of my
HTML through Perl subroutines, but sometimes it's easier just to code up a
little raw HTML, and I either do that as a here document, or I slurp it in
from a file, and then I use HTML::TreeBuilder to stick it into my
HTML::Entities tree.
Having said all this, I must say that a friend of mine has done a very
similar project w/posting photos to the web, and he went the template
approach. He went with (gasp) ASP, and I must say, his code looks pretty
clean and maintainable. Also, at the last SPUG meeting, the slashcode guy
says that they have been happy with the template solution. Even so, I am
content with my non-templates solution.
If you do go the Subs/Entities route, here are some headaches that you might
encounter:
1) Tr for table rows can trip you up, if you don't realize it's a reserved
word in Perl. This is well documented, but I got tripped up on it any way.
2) It seems hard to get  's into the page, without them being
overtranslated. The workaround is easy, though.
3) Mixing raw HTML into the Subs/Entities data structure was tough for me at
first. In the end, I wrote like a three line function that used TreeBuilder
to solve the problem, but I wish this had been documented better, or if there
is an even simpler way, I wish it were documented more clearly.
One last thought for Jason -- check out the Data::Locations module. Even if
you don't use it for HTML, it's great food for thought.
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