html generator
today i wrote a stripped down html generator (in php, of course). there’s got a be a jazzier word than generator. you know something that’s the opposite of a parser. something that models and spits out a tree.
it has the ability to generate a single HTML tag with attributes and optionally some content and an end tag. like this:
<acronym title="mainstream media">msm</acronym>
or this:
<img src="some_image.jpg" />
that’s it. in all its glory. seems totally worthless, huh? but the beauty is that it can represent any tag (element actually) with any attributes (in other words it will create well-formed but not valid html). so it’s pretty flexible.
and the contents (”msm” in the first example above) can be either text and/or other elements which can in turn contain text and/or other elements. so i can use it to model a whole webpage, since every webpage is at the root composed of a single html element:
<html>justin <em>blathering</em> about some techie junk</html>
it’s kind of modeled on my rudimentary understanding of the dom with a much simpler/cleaner interface. it doesn’t have any fancy tree traversing methods yet but i’m getting there.
anyway, here’s the code: HTMLElement.phps.
update: in php 5, the new dom functions should accomplish what i’ve intended with my code.
where’s it going? the article you posted about ajax is quite interesting by the way, i’m glad there’s a term for the idea - i’ve been pondering using something similar in one of my projects…