The only analogy I can think of right now is if I handed you a Lego Technic kit that you can build a transformer out of, composed of lots of lovely little pieces designed to fit together and to transform smoothly from their initial state to their final state

The problem is that the little pieces don't fit together in what you handed me. There are some connectors missing. I'm slowly getting you to realise these connectors are missing.

would not render certain documents correctly.

Only if you misapply it.

Your current flow is:

plugin produces aXML code,
   parser takes that aXML code and produces HTML code,
      browser takes that HTML code and produces text.
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Except your plugins don't always produce aXML code. For example, look at d. IIRC, you said it currently produces HTML. escape addresses that bug. It will convert the HTML into aXML.

text_to_aXML: The "escape" function I posted, renamed for clarity.
text_to_html: Converts & to &amp, < to &lt, etc.

# Current
sub d {
   my $text = ...;
   return text_to_html($text);
}

# Should be
sub d {
   my $text = ...;
   return text_to_aXML(text_to_html($text));
}
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You seem to be considering what would happen if every plugin used it, and indeed that would make no sense.

plugin produces aXML code,
   parser takes that aXML code and produces HTML code,
      browser takes that HTML code and produces text.
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You've misunderstood the flow.

parser takes aXML code,

parser discovers/executes valid aXML tags

   plugins produce either aXML or HTML or mix of both (or other)


parser discovers/executes valid aXML tags

   plugins produce either aXML or HTML or mix of both (or other)

....

parser can find no more valid aXML tags

parser exits, post processing occurs

browser takes finished resulting HTML and produces page
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---

Here, I just got finished playing around with a question someone posted about processing some poorly formed HTML given that they don't know (or want to know) anything about regexs.

In aXML I would solve it like this :

(aXMLplugin name="TD")"$_[0]",(/aXMLplugin)

(aXMLplugin name="TR")
   <db_write>INSERT INTO captured_rows VALUES 
      (<chop><strip_tws>$_[0]</strip_tws></chop>);
   </db_write>
(/aXMLplugin)

(inc)path/to/htmldata(/inc)
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The above primes two new plugins called TR and TD just for this job, then includes the html file specified and processes it adding any information it can correctly identify into a database as it goes.

The states it goes through during processing are:

State1
------

(aXMLplugin name="TD")"$_[0]",(/aXMLplugin)

(aXMLplugin name="TR")
   <db_write>INSERT INTO captured_rows VALUES 
      (<chop><strip_tws>$_[0]</strip_tws></chop>);    
   </db_write>
(/aXMLplugin)

(inc)path/to/htmldata(/inc)



State2
------

(aXMLplugin name="TR")
   <db_write>INSERT INTO captured_rows VALUES 
      (<chop><strip_tws>$_[0]</strip_tws></chop>);    
   </db_write>
(/aXMLplugin)

(inc)path/to/htmldata(/inc)


State3
------

(inc)path/to/htmldata(/inc)


State4
------

<TR>
 <TD> Channel </TD>
<TD> Call Letters </TD>
<TD>  Count </TD>
<TD> Percent  </TD>
<TD> Title   </TD>

</TR>
...
...


State5
------

<TR>
 " Channel ",
 " Call Letters ",
 "  Count ",
 "  Percent  ",
 "  Title   ",

</TR>
...
...


State6
------

<db_write> INSERT INTO captured_rows VALUES (<chop><strip_tws>
  " Channel ",
  " Call Letters ",
  " Percent  ",
  " Title   ",           

</strip_tws></chop>);</db_write>
...
...


State7
------

<db_write> INSERT INTO captured_rows VALUES (<chop>
  " Channel ",
  " Call Letters ",
  " Percent  ",
  " Title   ",</chop>);</db_write>
...
...


State8
------

<db_write> INSERT INTO captured_rows VALUES (
  " Channel ",
  " Call Letters ",
  " Percent  ",
  " Title   ");</db_write>
...
...
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As I'm sure you can see there are a couple of plugins there that are not in the standard set I sent to you earlier. I think it should be quite obvious to you how they would work and how you would go about adding them to the set.

Except maybe the "(aXMLplugin)" tag, which needs a little more explanation... the data it contains is returned interpolated. So:

(aXMLplugin name="greet")hello world(/aXMLplugin)
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Would look like this in the plugin code it produces :

 greet => sub {"hello world"},
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The fact it's a one liner to be interpolated is taken as being implicit in the way I'm thinking about this plugin at the moment, such that :

(aXMLplugin name="foo")"hello world"(/aXMLplugin)
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Would look like this in the code level :

   foo => sub {"\"hello world\""},
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And give this for output :

"hello world"
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Sigh. For every step forward, there's a step backwards.

That's not true. The output of the plugin is ALWAYS take to be aXML. If it was any other way, aXML would look like the following (when outputting HTML):

plugin produces aXML or HTML code,
   if the plugin returned aXML,
     the parser takes that aXML code and produces HTML code,
         browser takes that HTML code and produces text.
   if the plugin returned HTML,
      browser takes that HTML code and produces text.
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There is no such check, because such a check is impossible. So, again, what actually happens is

plugin produces (what is taken to be) aXML code,
   parser takes that aXML code and produces HTML code,
      browser takes that HTML code and produces text.
[download]

Plugins that don't produce aXML are buggy.