On Sun 23 Jan 2005, Kjetil Kjernsmo kjetil@kjernsmo.net wrote:
In other cases, you can't reasonably expect to get just a fragment, you'll get the whole document, even if you're just interested in a fragment. I'd like to create a Formatter around HTML::Tidy RSN, and while libtidy can format fragments, HTML::Tidy can't yet, AFAIK.
I'm not sure that the limitations of a helper module are a good thing to base an API on. You seem to be saying that because HTML::Tidy can't be told not to add <head>, <body>, etc to things, then a Formatter using it as a helper module must always return a full HTML document regardless of whether this is appropriate.
Or perhaps I'm misunderstanding, since you mention the "fragment" method. But if you're going to provide a method to return a fragment, the limitations of whatever module you get to do the heavy lifting aren't relevant, surely.
I've just read the HTML::Tidy docs at http://cpan.uwinnipeg.ca/htdocs/HTML-Tidy/HTML/Tidy.html and as far as I can tell what it does is check the syntax of an HTML document. I can't see how to make it spit out HTML. What am I missing?
For an AxKit Provider, you would usually want to return a document, since, in principle it can be served directly to the user.
I don't actually know how AxKit works, but it seems to me that a Formatter can only ever create a really basic HTML document. How is it to know things like keywords, description, stylesheet, RDF auto-discovery whatsit, etc, to put in the <head>? What can it be reasonably expected to do other than stick in a really basic <html><head><title>Whatever the title was set as in the input</title></head><body> at the start of the output and </body></html> at the end? Is that ever really going to be useful?
This is not meant to pour scorn on your idea, but to explain how I see it at the moment and hopefully provoke comments from others.
Kake