> Let's be honest, XSL is is one big logic step itself -- moreover it's a > whole other language to learn.
<ramble> I wouldn't call it a _big_ step. It only looks big when you look down. 8-) I would tend rather to encourage the use of XSL, myself. If you can pick up php okay, you ought to have few problems with XSL. (My biggest problem with XSL is remembering to let the application language handle the hard logic. Don't try to calculate the company budget in XSL, except as a logic game to amuse yourself while riding the train home.) You have your data in the database, and a filter (ergo, PHP code) to extract the data, dress it up a bit and add XML tags. Then you have an XSL filter to munge the XML into HTML. And the nice thing about XSL is that the web page layout is all determined by the XSL. Of course, it does work out to be a bit messier than it sounds, but the benefits are definite. To the OP -- don't focus on the code, don't focus on the coding style either, focus on the problem. The object is not to avoid mixing PHP and HTML, and the object is not to use (or not use) objects. Rather, it is to separate processes that are more related to the business side of things from processes that are more related to the presentation side. My comments on XSL aside, you can program both business and presentation in PHP. HTML will mostly be in the presentation side, but not necessarily always. For instance, on the business side, you may sometimes want to provide a table of the projected monthly profits for the next year as a complete table wrapped in tags, rather than providing the raw numbers to the presentation side. If the design is in someone else's hands, you'll want a template engine. The basic concept is that the designer designs the template, putting template tags in where the data should go. The presentation code picks up the data and the template, replaces the tags with the data, and spits the result out at the viewer's browser. Some template engines are better at actually conforming to that model than others (particualarly in relation to your app), and XSL can definitely be used in ways that don't conform to that model. That's no big deal, just part of what makes life interesting. (And if you get into Javaland, you'll hear a lot about MVC and frameworks. That's a slightly more refined, uhm, model.) </ramble> -- Joel Rees, programmer, Kansai Systems Group Altech Corporation (Alpsgiken), Osaka, Japan http://www.alpsgiken.co.jp -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
