Hi Martin, On 22/04/07, Martin Wille <mw8329@yahoo.com.au> wrote:
Steven Siloti wrote:
Shams wrote:
2. Easy way to generate the HTML DOM tree
This seems to be a commonly requested feature form cgi libraries but is it really that necessary?
No, it's not, IMHO. "CGI" is about a protocol (or about several protocols if FCGI, SCGI, WSGI, etc get supported, too), "HTML" is just one of many document formats delivered over that protocol. It really makes no sense to couple those two tightly.
Additionally, it's more than what I would expect to be done during a single SoC session.
I agree. I've played with having html helper classes with CGI libraries in the past, but I don't think including it suits either Boost or C++. It seems to me that it just encourages bad
habits, i.e. mixing logic and presentation.
Agreed.
Ok. Shouldn't we instead focus
on providing a convenient template system a la ctemplate but with a more
appropriate API?
This makes more sense than supporting a single document format. However, I think it's also beyond the scope of a CGI library. A template engine could be useful in non-web applications as well; so it should not get coupled with a protocol engine, either.
Jeff Garland sent me a link ( http://tinyurl.com/6v5vx ) which mentioned a need for html/xml/soap stream formatting libraries too. The best I can do for now is to make the library c++-stream and Boost.Iostreams compatible, and wait for the other libraries to come around. Thanks for the comments, Darren