Perl Mongers Meeting Next Wednesday - dan's still waffling

[Dan Morrison]

Grant McLean wrote:

> From: Dan Morrison [mailto:dan.morrison at vuw.ac.nz]
> > Parsing XML is dull [...]
>
> Not if you've never done it before :-)

When it comes to tokenizing streams by hand, in Perl it's a LOT less
painful than Java!
OK, look, I never said it was *easy*, just not particularly rivetting as
a discussion topic.

After all, one of the theoretical points of the whole XML revolution is
that we can now give up on worrying about the intracies of file formats
and just work with portable data. Admittedly that's not the case yet,
but soon thre'll be as many XML editing apps as there are bloody HTML
tools, and it's very rarely I get any 'wow factor' out of seeing that
the app got the syntax colouring crorrect (ie, it parsed).

>
> Perhaps you could set the ball rolling by showing us what *you've*
> achieved.  Even just a 10 minute walkthrough along the lines of
> 'this is an XML document, this is a style sheet, this is the
> result and this is how it works'.
>

Weeellll. There's this thing I've been working on I'm calling HTML::GUI
or GUIML, where I've got XML docs that define an interface and XSL which
turns it into forms of certain schemes or skins. CGI + XML::DOM +
XML::XSLT. It sort of becomes a toolkit for CGI scripts, but could be
applied to any app. It can eventually interface with Tcl when I get
inspired to do so.

It's along the lines of two current DTDs - Xwingml (This concept in Java
Swing) and UIML (Which looks like just a theoretical thesis at this
point, it's crap) sorry, no bookmarks on hand.

<Interface>
 <Panel>
  <Button title="Click Me!" id="click-button" action="click_action" />
  Go, on, you know you want to!
 </Panel>
</Interface>

I'd love to bounce that around, but I don't want to distract everyone
with the serious DHTML action that was the hard bit.

Re-usable XSL libraries and XSLT is my current bent, and I've been
contributing to the module over the last few months (it's woeful).
So OK, I'll if I can just get my current examples to a _stable_ state
.....

.dan.