Subject: Re: VOLUNTEER REQUEST
From: John L Grantham (john@grantham.com)
Date: Thu Aug 10 2000 - 18:47:20 EDT
At 5:25 pm -0500 10/8/00, BWS - Offwhite wrote:
>As for PHP, Perl or whatever, it would be great if that could be
>hidden. I do this site...
>
>http://www.onmilwaukee.com/
>
>I try my best to hide all scripts. All dynamic content is included via
>SSI's and made fast with mod_perl, yet the documents all say
>xyz.html. That way any site which mirrors the main site does not have to
>worry about it. They can display html documents already, and do not need
>to worry about setting up .php or .ehtml pages.
>
>I could help set this up. I do this kind of work for a living.
Some comments:
The sites I do basically rely on PHP to do dynamic content for the
main reason of supporting as many browsers directly as possible. This
means that, instead of using lowest-common-denominator HTML, we can
use scalable HTML that reacts to the remote client according to its
HTTP_USER_AGENT and other environment variables.
For example, setting font sizes and families works well this way,
because we can therefore use CSS in those browsers that support it
while using other tags (<FONT></FONT> for example) in those that
don't. This also makes for cleaner HTML for each and every browser,
without junk that the particular browser doesn't understand.
I know some people will holler that fonts aren't important or that
they override the settings anyway, but for the vast majority of
users, font settings can help quite a lot in making the page more
legible (for example, don't use Times -- other sans-serif fonts are
more legible on the screen and don't look so broken -- but Times is
nearly always the default, which is why I always try to set another
font).
Further, the sites I build are constructed in such a way that the
central template(s) are separated from the content, allowing the
content to be reused or regenerated in another format pretty easily.
It would be possible, though, to write a PHP-based HTML parser such
that the PHP engine reads a normal, plain-vanilla HTML file (i.e.
nothing but straight <P></P> and <Hn></Hn> tags, perhaps also <B></B>
and <I></I>) and converts it to the template on-the-fly. Thus one
could easily mirror the HTML version while keeping a dynamic version
at the ready. Another option would be to have the content in some
standard format, like XML or DocBook, and parse that instead.
It also depends on how you intend to mirror the pages. A mirror via
HTTP requests would work even with PHP-based dynamic content, so long
as there is a 1:1 relationship between PHP pages and "real" URL pages
(i.e. don't use query strings and database-controlled content).
The further concern I have about straight HTML is that it's all too
easy for plain HTML pages to go haywire over time, especially once
people start trying to edit them using [insert WYSIWYG editor name
here]. Some people's idea of HTML is radically different from others,
which results in crappy HTML over time (raising the risk of
bad-looking or buggy pages later). For example, some people like to
omit </P>, </TR> or </TD> tags, since they in theory aren't needed,
but that causes problems with many browsers. Using a standardized
template solves that by having a unified way of making pages.
Hope that all makes sense,
John
--John Grantham | Dipl.-Designer (FH) | Homepage http://design.macnews.de/ | Linux for PPC: http://linuxppc.org/
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