[Webware-devel] RE: [Webware-discuss] Announce: a new HTML Forms Library for Webware WebKit

[Matt F. <ma...@da...>]

This certainly looks promising, but I'm afraid that it's pretty over my
head.

I'm not familiar with any of the products/projects you mentioned, but we are
continuously looking for better options for templating than the standard
ways (isn't everyone?).

We're also looking for more "automatic" ways of defining a form, or defining
it algorythmically, which also seems to be related to what you've got here.

XML has of course come up several times. I'm quite interested in your
approach. I'll look into these projects.

To TRY and answer your question, there's no reason that the behavior you're
talking about couldn't be implemented. We tried very hard to let FormKit's
black box be pretty transparent. A simple helper/glue function to build your
template would be easy.

I'll read up and try to understand your ideas. Any tips on where to start?

| -----Original Message-----
| From: Bill Eldridge [mailto:bi...@rf...]
| Sent: Thursday, April 18, 2002 7:07 AM
| To: Matt Feifarek
| Cc: web...@li...
| Subject: Re: [Webware-discuss] Announce: a new HTML Forms Library for
| Webware WebKit
|
|
| Matt Feifarek wrote:
| > Martin and I are making our first public release of our new
| "FormKit", and
| > wanted to invite the Webware community to try it out, comment, and even
| > participate in its further development.
|
| [posted only to the devel list]
|
| Looks interesting (I'd say fun, but I think that's trademarked
| by Ian - how about "FreeFormKit"?).
|
| One thing I don't really see in either kit is having
| a template that uses regular expressions, something like:
|
| Person:
| <name>{1}
| 	Mandatory 1
| <address>{1?}
| 	Mandatory at least 1
| <phone>{1,3}
| 	Mandatory 1-3
| <publications>{*}	Non-mandatory
| <email>{1+}
| <fax>{1?}
| 	0 or 1
| <company>{1}
|
| Company:
| <companyname>{1}
| <companycontact>{1+}
|
| Contact:
| ...
| ...
|
| And then have the possibility for FormKit to generate
| additional blocks as needed, say if I want a second
| address block for my home office, a third for my
| PO Box, etc.
|
| Something that would parse a schema (Relax NG from
| PyXML sandbox? regular schemas using PyTrex, also in PyXML)
| or a DTD would fit in with my XML needs.
|
| I can see a bit how to do this on my own, but it seems
| like dynamic block or field generation would be a useful
| feature for the FormKit.
|
|
| --
| Bill Eldridge
| Radio Free Asia
| bi...@rf...
|