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JL235
Created : 31 August 2010
 
System : Linux

HTML generation in PHP
I'm currently toying with the idea of building some classes for generating HTML from PHP code. The idea is to try to cut down on the mix-mash you can get of HTML and PHP, especially to remove all of the <?php ?> tags you end up having everywhere.

So here are two code samples. The first is some actual HTML code I wrote last night, the second is a fictional PHP example I've just cooked up which would output the same HTML code.

HTML:


PHP:

The PHP version works by having a HTML generator stored in the $html variable. When methods are called on it a new HTML generator is returned with those changes stored, allowing calls to be chained.

You'd have to manually call for them to be echo'd, but their toString would also return the HTML version. So you could also use the generated HTML as a string. As you can see the PHP heavy version is not shorter, but I wonder if it's easier to read?

What are people's thoughts on this?

 

Comments
Tuesday, 31 August 2010, 09:40
Jayenkai
 		Personally I find the "Looks like code" PHP version (#2) better, but I imagine there's a whole bunch of people who prefer the "Looks like HTML" version. (#1)

The codey one reads easier to me. Although you've still indented everything in the HTML one, it's all kinda "here's one bit, oops, back again, some more, jump back, hop in, hop out, do the hokey-cokey".. And Google Chrome can spell hokey-cokey..

I think this is just a personal preference thing, it doesn't make it any better or worse, but as a coder I'd imagine you'd prefer the second.

Has anyone ever done any bulk-tests? Is it quicker to stay in PHP mode, or quicker to jump back and forth?!
Tuesday, 31 August 2010, 09:40
CodersRule
 		I like the concept, but HTML is a lot easier to read and I personally don't believe you're saving enough to use it rather than just using HTML.

And you'd want the HTML class to be quick, because writing out direct HTML is a lot quicker than calling functions to write out the same code.

|edit| Jay's post wasn't there when I was posting. |edit|
|edit| Edit 2: Adding more: |edit|
Also, there's stuff that you'd need to relearn. By _just_ knowing HTML, you wouldn't know that the $html->a has the text() method.

It'd also be harder to organize in that it'd be harder to style with CSS. Would you rather try to style

Is that how you would do a div? It'd be annoying, because you'd have to define all of the HTML code into a variable before writing it out, or organization would be even more of a mess.
Would you rather style that? Or this:

HTML has been kept over the years partly because it's easy to read and write. That's an important feature of it.
Tuesday, 31 August 2010, 09:44
JL235
 		Tbh I don't care about performance. Interacting with the DB will certainly be more expensive, especially if your site is popular (and so has lots of stuff in it). At this point in time I'm mainly caring about making writing HTML easier.

@Jay That's exactly why I want to build something like this, to make my HTML files look less like dirty scripts.

But I think I kinda agree with this:
CodersRule I personally don't believe you're saving enough to use it rather than just using HTML.


One minor improvement is it can include some in-built things, like the text function could add slashes to make your text HTML safe (you'd use the html function to avoid this). That means you can dump user input into the HTML without caring about security. I could also add some default values for tag attributes which your supposed to always include.

I'm gonna continue toying with this idea.
Tuesday, 31 August 2010, 14:37
Stealth
 		If you can come up with a more clever implementation of this, I think you have something. The PHP pseudo code you've shown isn't more effective. I also think there is a huge drawback because it requires you to learn these new PHP tags.

A better solution would be to create a template engine rather than an HTML generator. Replace your <?=$var?> with %var% or what-not. I think if you came up with a really cool way to write templates, it would be a far simpler and more flexible solution.
Tuesday, 31 August 2010, 22:16
JL235
 		First I think this is closer to what I'm settling on:

Lots of more parameters supplied for the elements and you'd create elements from a HTML static class rather then an object held in a variable.

@Coders I wouldn't want to have to concat lots of HTML into a single string either. Instead you could do something like:

But I think the best solution would be to just write the above in HTML.

I'm thinking that this would be mainly used for replacing the fiddly bits where your mixing lots of PHP and HTML together. If you notice in my example it's all wrapped within an outer div, as it's much simpler to use HTML for that.

What I'm also liking is that it would be easier to build extra components where you need to add code both before and after your HTML code. For example I have some HTML for building overlays that appear on top of the webpage, but the code to use it is essentially:

But instead I could wrap that up as an extra HTML component, as say:
Thursday, 02 September 2010, 08:32
JL235
 		I've decided to implement this and move over some of my code to use it. The extras stuff seems to be really making a difference. It's only small but I have code that looks like this:

instead of:

A pure PHP solution is much more to the point.