[Seaside] Seaside + SSP

[Avi Bryant]

On Thu, 16 Jan 2003, Stephen Pair wrote:

> This of course bypasses the formatting supplied by the WAHtmlGenerator,
> which would eliminate the possibility of re-directing the render method
> to some non-html output.  What would be really cool is if we could make
> a parser that would parse the HTML (or other markup) in the SSP method
> and spit out bytecodes that call methods on the HTML generator.  Then
> you could conventiently write rendering methods in marked up text, yet
> still be able to re-direct output to a different markup language.

Yeah, I played with something like that at one point (not generating
bytecodes directly, just doing a source-to-source transform).  The problem
is that the interesting part is not HtmlGenerator but HtmlRenderer, and so
you have to find ways of representing things like anchorWithAction:text:
in the html.  But I still think it would be a decent way of adding
templating to the current system.

I've also been doing experiments recently with replacing HtmlGenerator
with an HtmlBuilder class, that has the same interface but generates a DOM
tree instead of directly printing to a stream.  Surprisingly, it doesn't
end up being measurably slower (even after rendering the tree down to
HTML), though it definitely creates more garbage.  My guess is that this
might allow more flexible templating approaches...