Webware for Python

Christoph Zwerschke wrote:
> Another thing I am missing is a html/xml library, i.e. a core support
> for generating html and xml code with Python.

There is ElementTree which is going to be in Python 2.5:

     http://effbot.org/zone/element-index.htm

Hi Christoph,

> Another thing I am missing is a html/xml library, i.e. a core support
> for generating html and xml code with Python.
>
> E.g., instead of
>
> self.writeln('<a href="http://xyz">abc</a>')
>
> you should be able to write something like
>
> self.a('abc', href="http://xyz")

I think you are looking for the SimpleHTMLGen.py from FunFormKit module:

SimpleHTMLGen.py
5 Oct 2002
Ian Bicking <ianb@...>

Kind of like htmlgen, only much simpler.  The only important symbol that
is exported is ``html``.

You create tags with attribute access.  I.e., the "A" anchor tag is
html.a.  The attributes of the HTML tag are done with keyword
arguments.  The contents of the tag are the non-keyword arguments
(concatenated).  You can also use the special "c" keyword, passing a
list, tuple, or single tag, and it will make up the contents (this is
useful because keywords have to come after all non-keyword arguments,
which is non-intuitive).

Regards,

-- 
Michel Thadeu Sabchuk
Curitiba - Brasil

michelts wrote:
> I think you are looking for the SimpleHTMLGen.py from FunFormKit module:
> ...
> Kind of like htmlgen, only much simpler.  The only important symbol that
> is exported is ``html``.

Bingo. I think I have already seen it, but forgotten again. This is
perfect. A library with knowledge of the whole html DTD (like Oracle's
htp/htf lib) would be already too complex. But this is so simple and
lightweight, yet still helpful, that it really should be included in the
WebUtils package.

Ian, what do you think? And what about packaging the FunFormKit with
Webware again (independent of that, I'd put SimpleHTMLGen in WebUtils)?

-- Chris

> [SimpleHTMLGen.py] is so simple and lightweight, yet still helpful,
> that it really should be included in the WebUtils package.

Even better - why not make SimpleHTMLGen also available as two methods
of HTTPContent (or Page: the html() method would return the HTML as a
string if you need to build nested html tags, and the wrhtml() method
would output the HTML directly, i.e. write(html(...)).

Nick Murtagh wrote:
>> Another thing I am missing is a html/xml library, i.e. a core support
>> for generating html and xml code with Python.
> 
> There is ElementTree which is going to be in Python 2.5:
> 
>      http://effbot.org/zone/element-index.htm

Right, and ElementTree is extremely useful anyway. Using ElementTree's
Element type and the tostring function, I could do this:

self.write(tostring(Element("a", href="http://xyz", text="abc")))

Still a bit clumsy, even if I wrap the two calls in one function. Maybe
it's easier with SimpleHTMLGen, and we are not dependent of ElementTree.

The main point is that we provide such a function as a core
functionality of Webware, probably as a servlet method.

-- Christoph