[FunFormKit-discuss] FFK Questions, musings

[Martin D. <ma...@pa...>]

Hi Ian.

First, thanks for your FFK library! We've been using FFK with our Webware
projects over the last 6 months or so. It works.

We are experiencing a recurrent frustration, however. It's hard to explain,
but to us your solution to hooking FFK into running servlets seems
unorthodox from a Webware perspective. This seems to be causing us confusion
whenever we revisit our FFK-enabled servlets. Can you clarify for us why you
integrate FFK by overwriting output methods, rather than having it do its
thing in awake()? Is there some subtle benefit that we're overlooking? (This
may just be a confusion of different methodologies. We try to keep "stuff
that builds state" in awake() and keep "stuff that makes html" in
outputXXX() methods.)

Another question: have you considered adapting FFK so that it can -- when
appropriate -- produce XHTML compliant tags? It would be nice if FFK could
read the self.writeDocType() or something to determine what kind of tags to
build. The actual requirements for adding XHTML tag support to FFK are
pretty simple. For XHTML,

- replace use of tables with divs in compound field classes
- make sure all tag attributes are quoted
- eliminate use of tag attributes that are deprecated in XHTML
- close all one-off tags, such as <br /> and <img /> and <input />

The main question would be the "preferable" way to implement it, be it by
alternate methods or some sort of tag dictionary look-up. What do you think?

Martin Doudoroff & Matt Feifarek