I'm thinking about layouts for HTML. I know alot has been written about XML, CSS, etc for seperating content from the look-and-feel.

I'm interested in making the look-and-feel as customizable as possible. More than just changing styles of text - I'd like to be able to change the order of the components, and the manner in which the components are layed out. By components I guess I mostly mean text boxes like Chatterbox. Each component can have it's own layout xml file, describing the order and manner inwhich it's components are displayed. For Example, the Chatterbox layout file might specify that the Talk input appear at the top.

I guess I'd just like peoples thoughts. I know there are many existing projects that must touch on this.

A big concern I have is how to implement components in perl. If perl was reading a layout file on-the-fly, and it discovered it required to render component X, then X could be a class of sorts, but:
  1. How to load the class X in a timely and memory efficient way? (I like the idea of Java Servlets - is there a similar model for perl?)
  2. How to make X aware of the environment restrictions that it is rendering to? (eg: the background colour is white and you have 300 width to work with ... please don't do not use yellow as your text colour and do not create any 600-width tables! ... I'm thinking that there might have to be a certain level of trust on this!)


thanks
Prarie Dawn

In reply to Laying out a web page by prarie dawn

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