I look at component built web pages in the following way. You have a top or encompassing structure which encapsulates a hierarchy of smaller components. For example:
top contains:
top menu bar
menu elements
left-hand advertisements
context specific advertisements
right hand menu
footerin rendering, the page, each component is rendered before using. This keep you from having any inconsistencies the presentation. In addition, there can be variable elements which are included within each page component such as title or section headings.
implementation outline:
I decided to create a prototype using Python and a template tool which is a part of the camram Web interface. The template tool is exceedingly stupid and very lightweight. All it does is substitute %%symbol%% with an entry in a dictionary whose key is symbol.
the input to the page builder is a dictionary like structure. It is filled with entries whose keys which correspond to the symbols in all of the components. The value of each entry is simply a string. When the dictionary is processed, the strings are run through the template tool and substitutions are made if the symbol can be found.
constructing a page from this behavior is relatively simple. The top-level component for the page is placed unmodified into the dictionary but all of the subordinate components are only the text found between <body></body> tags. again, when processing the dictionary, all of the page elements are processed and, if you did everything right, you have a web page.
a practical example:
# the first web page
zodiac = inflatable()
zodiac["top"] = "\n".join(file("index.html").readlines())
zodiac["title"] = "c a m r a m: Welcome to CAMRAM:"
zodiac["copyright_date"] = "2002-2004"
zodiac["main_welcome"] = extract_core("main_welcome.html")
zodiac["main_news"] = extract_core("main_news.html")print zodiac["top"]
the entry "top" contains the top-level page. Title is an example of a simple string substitution as his copyright_date. The two component pages main_welcome and main_news are examples of HTML pages that have the core extracted and placed into the dictionary.
Retrieving the top-level page triggers the rendering process which allows you to print, save, or do whatever you wish. It's just a really big string.
rendered page: http://harvee.org/cac/xyz/lindex.html
component pages: http://harvee.org/cac/xyz/index.html http://harvee.org/cac/xyz/main_welcome.html http://harvee.org/cac/xyz/main_news.html
what's the win?
The win is its trivially easy to build template based pages. But for me, the biggest wind is that individual components can be edited with an ordinary HTML editor. If I want,I can even use the same cascading style sheets as the top-level page so I can get a reasonably accurate indication of how the component renders in a browser. All in all, it's a very simple yet powerful framework for describing HTML pages.
I'm offering this nascent idea to the Web make community because it may prove useful either as an enhancement to the existing Web make model of operation or as a foundation for Webmake II
---eric
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