[PHPTAL] back to the dom parser idea

[Kornel Lesiński]

On 11.01.2008, at 23:30, Rodrigo Moraes wrote:

> Hello,
> Today I finally created a demo of PHPTAL working with a PHP DOM
> parser, and sent it to a temporary GoogleCode repository. Here's the
> project:
>
>  http://code.google.com/p/phptalwithdom/
[...]
>
> that's it. let me know what do you think. :)

I've created a new branch based on your code and added bunch of  
bugfixes:
https://svn.motion-twin.com/phptal/branches/withdom

Unfortunately it still doesn't work quite right (see tests/run- 
tests.php script).

PHPTAL's code-generator expects elements and attributes to have  
namespace prefixes, which were added as neccessary by the parser. DOM  
of course doesn't do this, which causes a lot of bugs and confusion.  
Handling of namespaces has to be fixed throughout the code before real  
DOM can be supported.

There are issues with DOM itself:
- it doesn't report line numbers for elements, so error messages  
(other than parse errors) can't include them. Not very user-friendly :(
- non-validating parser can't support named entities (like  ),  
but users will expect them to work. Switching to validating parser is  
not an option, because it will reject incomplete HTML fragments and  
PHPTAL elements.
- parser decodes numeric entities and represents them as literal  
characters, possibly exposing encoding issues.

-- 
regards, Kornel