It seems the most common aproach to web design is to use HTML/XHTML & CSS in conjunction with other technologies or languages like Javascript or PHP.
On a theoretical level, I'm interested to know what other languages or technologies could be used to build an entire site without using a single HTML tag or CSS style for styling/positioning?
Could a website be made only using XML or PHP alone, including actual styling and positioning?
Presumably Flash sites are till embedded in HTML tags?
Thanks
There are actually several solutions that allow you to nearly completely avoid CSS and HTML.
GWT: Google Web Toolkit
Written in Java and will allow you to build both server and client code in Java. Used to build Google Wave.
Cappuccino and Objective-J:
Objective-J is to JavaScript as Objective-C is to C. It extends JavaScript with many near features, including type-checking, classes and types.
Cappuccino is like Cacoa (Mac OS X GUI toolkit).
Using these two you can build incredibly rich and desktop like webapps. They run mostly on the client side and you can use whatever you want on the server.
A good example is 280slides
SproutCore is similar to Cappuccino, but it uses pure JavaScript instead. Apple is using SproutCore to make me.com.
I should also mention that knowledge to HTML, CSS, JavaScript is a good skill to know, just like understanding your compiler is a good skill.
EDIT:
As said above Adobe Flash can also be used.
You can make a website with out a single html tag. Just give folder read access to all your directories, have sensible file names. From here you user will be able to browse images , read text files, download videos and depending on the content he may or may not come back ever again, but you do achieve the goal of setting up a "website" with out a single line of html or css or any other code for that matter.
:-) :-) :-)
You can host a telnet server with anonymous access and a specialized shell that restricts the user to doing whatever it is you want the site to do. ;)
Lets make the distinction between what is required by the web browser, and what you as a developer use to create that markup.
Remember that HTML nowadays is xml. You could use any markup language you like and convert that to HTML using XML.
eg ASP.NET uses markup such as which is converted on the server to .
As long as the content going down the wire to the browser is HTML, or generates HTML through script, you can use any approach you like.
However these approaches have mostly failed as developers prefer having direct control over the markup. It makes css as well as scripting much easier when you are certain what the html is going to be.
ASP.NET MVC is a product created in response to criticisms leveled at the ASP.NET webforms model.
Also, this is another answer because it's a completely different technology, but you can write an application in XUL and it'll run in Mozilla-based browsers without any HTML.
There's also XML. You can create websites with XML only. A well known one is World Of Warcraft. Check the page source. An XSL is used as stylesheet. There exist even XML based web frameworks like OpenLaszlo. You can let it serve either DHTML or Flash on reqeust out of a single XML template.
The Wt C++ Web Toolkit.
You can write your web application in C++ using Qt-style widgets (input boxes, buttons, tabs etc) and hook up client-side events to C++ code on your server. All without writing any HTML or CSS.
A sample application from their website (you may also want to look at this excellent tutorial):
HelloApplication::HelloApplication(const WEnvironment& env)
: WApplication(env)
{
setTitle("Hello world"); // application title
root()->addWidget(new WText("Your name, please ? ")); // show some text
nameEdit_ = new WLineEdit(root()); // allow text input
nameEdit_->setFocus(); // give focus
WPushButton *b = new WPushButton("Greet me.", root()); // create a button
b->setMargin(5, Left); // add 5 pixels margin
root()->addWidget(new WBreak()); // insert a line break
greeting_ = new WText(root()); // empty text
/* when the button is clicked, call the 'greet' method */
b->clicked().connect(this, &HelloApplication::greet);
}
void HelloApplication::greet()
{
/* set the empty text object greeting_ to greet the name entered */
greeting_->setText("Hello there, " + nameEdit_->text());
}
Curl (requires a browser plugin)
Wikipedia article
A webpage looks like this:
{curl 1.7 applet}
{value
let b:int=99
let song:VBox={VBox}
{while b > 0 do
{song.add b & " bottle(s) of beer on the wall,"}
{song.add b & " bottle(s) of beer."}
{song.add "Take one down, pass it around,"}
set b = b - 1
{song.add b & " bottle(s) of beer on the wall."}
}
song
}
Source
Since browsers view HTML, I'm assuming you mean create a site without ever having to edit/write HTML/CSS. The framework/app environment/whatever taking care of everything for you - yet still allowing you control over the presentation layer.
Seems like that is certainly possible on a theoretical level.
I ran across Noloh (not one line of html) a while back. Was intrigued, but never actually tried it out.
From various places on the Noloh site:
Because NOLOH does not rely on HTML or pages, maintaining complex rich Internet applications is significantly easier than with other methods.
Developing applications with NOLOH only requires using a single, unified language: a superset of PHP that completely maintains all aspects of server-client communication for you!
I think you could build a site entirely in SVG.
The front page of emacsformacosx is almost entirely SVG, for example.
Downsides: It wouldn't be viewable in IE (at least through version 8). And last I looked, text support, like flowing and justification, was weaker in SVG. (You could embed HTML inside an SVG element when you needed sophisticated text features, but that would violate your no-HTML rule.)
You'd probably still want to use CSS with SVG, because it's a good idea there for the same reason it's a good idea with HTML, but it wouldn't be necessary.
A website is always viewed through a browser (at least always if you are human :)). Browsers understand HTML. Whatever the technology - you have to basically render HTML. Even in cases with rich technologies like flash, the flash object that is rendered by a browser plugin is embedded inside the HTML.
In theory it is possible to do it without HTML, but the question becomes how much does the product diverge from the definition of a website...
One really short, simple answer... you can't :D
Flash requires an embed tag, an image requires an embed tag etc, so you'd have to use HTML in some method or another.
PHP is an embedded language, it is used to generate HTML on which the browsers renders, with XML, well technically a browser like Ie or FireFox will render it in it's own way for readability, but I would not class that as a website.
The major developments in the world of web technologies involves the development of HTML and CSS to improve them, there isn't any need for an alternative. In fact we're pushing towards a standard, what point would there be in introducing a new language to negate these standards. The whole IE saga would simply get worse.
Like the others have suggested, you could directly load an image or a flash file, but an image is useless on it's own, and a flash interface throws up loads of problems like SEO, accessibility etc, not least it's very heavy and usually completely misused. In my mind I wouldn't even class this method as a website, it just doesn't tick any of the boxes (IMO).
I think you can have an URL pointing directly at a hosted Flash (SWF) file, I've certainly done this though I don't know if all browsers work.
Anyhow, I tested this when developing MyDinos.
e.g: http://mydinos.com/home.swf
You can use Emscripten and its SDL subset.
You could try using quickstatic. You can code HTML templates from Python3. What is super cool about it is the fact that if you put in a for-loop for a certain item, you can generate that many items (maybe even use it to print items from a directory or quickly serve thousands of links).
Related
First, a short disclaimer. I have next to no knowledge about web applications. I come from an iOS background where I exclusively wrote native code, so if you write your answers like I know nothing outside the shallow parts, that would be great.
I'm interested in learning a stack to develop web applications, but I'm not sure what the right way to build the GUI is. I know that a web front end consists of html and CSS to create the display and javascript as the bridge between the back end and the GUI, but I don't know the best way to put something together.
I know in iOS, you can use the Interface Builder (part of xcode that lets you graphically create the xml that describes the display) to create GUI's without any knowledge of how iOS translates the xml to some rendering, or even what is written in your xml files. Is there any analog to the web front end?
I'm mainly just looking for a list of the accepted ways to develop the GUI for a web application. If I have to learn HTML and CSS, so be it, but I'd like to know what my options are and the tradeoffs between each of them.
I can answer shortly stating that (technically) you can design web pages without coding in HTML or CSS, or even Javascript - although, you would be somewhat limited in your creative abilities and applications.
You can read about WYSIWYG html editors on this link, or try out ckeditor (someone said it's good)...
...I think a bit of background will help you reach a correct decision...
so here goes:
The Long Answer
I would start by trying to put the world of web programming and design into concepts that correlate with iOS coding.
If we look at the whole of a web app from an MVC perspective, then the browser is the view, the server is the controller and the database is the model... although this is very simplified.
Just like in iOS, each of these can be (but doesn't have to be) broken down into sub-MVC systems.
Just like any model in MVC, the view (the browser) can talk to the model (the database), but really it shouldn't. that's just bad practice.
If we break down the main-view (the browser) to a sub-MVC system, I would consider the HTML as the model, the CSS as the view and the browser (through links and javascript) as the controller.
It's not all that clear cut, but thinking like this helps me practice better and cleaner coding.
The HTML is the view's model for the web-app - it contains the data to be displayed or used.
HTML is a variation on the XML format and it contains data organized in a similar way to an XML file.
The basic HTML file will contain:
<html>
<head>
</head>
<body>
</body>
</html>
this should look familiar to you if you read any XML.
The CSS (cascading style sheets) is the view - it states HOW the html DATA should be displayed.
if your web app does't have any CSS, it will use the browser's default CSS/styling to be applied on the data in the HTML.
This "language" makes me think more about dictionaries in iOS (I think that's what they're called in Objective C). They have properties and values (like key-value pairs) that determine how the HTML data is displayed (if it's displayed).
They could look something like this:
body
{
color: white;
background-color: black
}
The browser is the web-app's view's controller - it makes it all work together and serves it up to the screen.
Javascript and links help us tell the controller what we want it to do, but it is the browser that acts (and willfully at times).
You can have a whole web app that acts without javascript, using only the default actions offered by links - in which case the browser will usually ask the server (the main controller) what to do.
Javascript helps us move some of the legwork from the server to the client, by allowing us to have a "smarter" controller for our view - just like in iOS.
The issue of the errant main-view / browser
Not all views are created equal, and not all browsers are the same.
Because the browser is used as the controller for the web-app's view, and because some browsers act differently then others, we web coders have the problem of working around someone else's idea of how our view's controller should behave.
You might see us complaining about it quite a lot (especially complaining about Internet Explorer).
These days, this issue is not as big of a problem as it used to be... it's just that some people don't update their computers...
WYSIWYG web editors
There are website builders and editors that try to work like X-Code does, by allowing us to build the website much like we would write word documents.
But, unlike X-Code which codes only the graphical interface of the view, these website builders write the model as well and usually add javascript into the mix.
When we use these tools (which I avoid), the whole MVC model breaks apart.
We can use them as a starting point for dirty work, but then we take their code apart and adjust it to our needs - usually by taking the code we need for the view (CSS) and applying it where we need it (and discarding much of the nonsense they add to the code and the HTML).
To summarize
As you can tell, HTML and CSS (and Javascript) are only a small part of a web app - as they all relate to the main view of the web app.
To write the controller and models for web apps, we use other tools (such as Ruby, PHP, js.node, MySQL and the like).
Coding the HTML and CSS isn't as hard as you might think, although it might be harder then I present it to be.
You can avoid writing code for web apps and use applications that offer WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get), but that would limit your abilities and will take away from your control over what you want to create.
I have to migrate a static HTML website to TYPO3. I know, I could read docus first, but I believe I will need to read some days first to only recognize which direction to run...
Do I have to learn TypoScript like
Default PAG
page = PAGE
page.typeNum = 0
page.20 = TEXT
page.20.value = HELLO UNIVERSE!
page.10 = TEXT
page.10.value = HELLO WORLD!
or is there another way to do it quickly? With markers?
thank you guys!
You will have to learn a little bit of TypoScript to do what you want. Sorry :-( But you won't have to learn that much, and what you do learn you'll be able to reuse when building other TYPO3 sites.
First thing: skip markers. Markers are a remnant of an old, deprecated templating system. The way you should be doing this is with TemplaVoila.
TemplaVoila works by giving you an interface to map TYPO3 content (or instructions to generate content) to blocks of markup in your HTML file. In other words, you take your static HTML file, then go through it and tell TemplaVoila "OK, that DIV is my sidebar, so put a list of all the site pages in there... that P is the footer, put a link to the privacy policy there... that DIV is the main content area, fill it with blocks of content created by the user," and so forth. This is a very powerful approach, because it means that if you work with other Web designers or graphic designers, they don't have to learn any special "magic tags" or markers; they can just give you well-formed HTML and with a few clicks you can turn it into a live template for a site. Pretty nifty.
There's a piece of TYPO3 documentation called "Futuristic Template Building" that explains pretty clearly how to go from a static HTML page to a TYPO3-ized site with TemplaVoila. Here's a direct link to the section of that doc that walks you through the process. (Don't be scared by the word "futuristic" into thinking that TemplaVoila isn't fully baked yet -- that doc was written six years ago, when TemplaVoila was pretty futuristic, but today it's quite mature and in use on TYPO3 sites all over the world.)
This should be enough to get you started, but if you hit roadblocks or can't wrap your head around it feel free to post your questions back to this thread and I'll help you out.
I'm reviving this, since a lot has happened since 2010.
There are multiple ways in TYPO3 to do the templating. All of them involve TypoScript, but in some there is only a minimal amount of TS needed.
Use "the old built-in way", doing all rendering in TypoScript and some HTML templates with markers in them. In this approach, you'd use the content elements provided by the core. Their rendering is defined with TypoScript in the core-extension "CSS Styled Content".
Use "the new built-in way". Here you'd also use the content elements provided by the core, and optionally self-defined ones. The rendering happens using the Fluid templating engine. You would do this using the core-extension "Fluid Styled Content". This is available since version 7.5.
Use a third party extension for content element rendering. I know of these:
Templavoilà - You probably should not use it, since it is not actively developed anymore, although there is a version claiming compatibility to TYPO3 7 LTS, but I don't know much about that.
FluidTYPO3 - This is a whole ecosystem of extensions with which you can define page templates and content element templates completely using the Fluid Templating engine (backend forms, backend preview and frontend rendering). It also provides a mechanism for nesting content elements.
DCE - Dynamic content elements. I don't know anything about them, you would need to read the docs.
Mask - TYPO3-core near wizard for own contentelements and pagetemplates. Uses database fields, not flexforms.
More extensions I don't know of.
It would be a bit much to explain all of these here in detail.
My current personal favorite is the FluidTYPO3 ecosystem, but I'm considering a switch to using Fluid Styled Content, because it is directly integrated into the core. I'm not sure if it supports nested content elements, so maybe one would need a separate solution for that (e.g. the extension gridelements).
How do I repair malformed HTML using C#? A great answer would be an HTML Agility Pack sample!
I'm scraping a site (for legitimate use). The site's HTML is OK but there are some annoying problems.
One way I could go would be through regular expressions. I used Expression Web to analyse the problems and the regular expressions needed to correct them. So one way would be to use a tool such as RegexBuddy to generate C# code for these regular expressions.
However, the recommended tool for processing malformed HTML in C# is the HTML Agility Pack (HAP). Moreover, I've analysed only a handful of pages and I'm afraid that future pages will contain patterns I've not yet solved, and I would hate to enter the "find the errors in the next few pages and correct them" maintenance business. So, if HAP already has a solid, always-working solution, this would be great. The problem is that except for a few mentions here at SO I could not find any how-to-use documentation for this tool, except for the object-by-object API help file.
So - before I spend $ and learning time on RegexBuddy (no free evaluation version), or break my teeth on HAP's API documentation - is there an easy way to do this? An HAP sample would help... :-)
can you tell me what kind of annoying problems are you having?
but you dont need to use regex to clean the html, HAP will let you access the elemtents of a malformed html using Xpath Queries.
and basically you need to learn Xpath to know how to get the html elements you want.
it really depends on the kind of html you are parsing using HAP.
but there is several ways to get the elements.
like by id or class or even you can get the element that follows another element that contain a given text like "name:" for example.
you can goto W3 schools Xpath Tutorial for a nice xpath tutorial
What I took from the answers here:
1) If you're scraping a website you don't control, you'll always enter a maintenance mode where you have to fix your scraper every time the layout of the page you're scraping changes.
2) If you are limited to this known site, why not write your scraper to adjust the problems
So, if I have to go into maintenance mode, it should be as easy as possible. Therefore, my process is as follows:
I use Webius's SWExplorerAutomation to detect scenes in Web pages. The idea is that a Scene is a collection of conditions you define for IE. When a web page is loaded, IE tries to see which set of conditions is met (e.g. - page title is "Account Login", the page contains a "Login" text box a "Password" text box). If a set of conditions corresponding to a scene is detected, IE reports that the scene has been detected. This model provides an abstraction layer - Some changes in the web page can translate to changes in the scene file, saving the code from having to change. Additionally, this shields me from IE's event driven model: I call "scene. I'm evaluating this product but I'm not yet sure I'll use it, mainly because the documentation is terrible. Another alternative is Watin, and one more reason I haven't yet bought SWEA is this article accusing its author of spamming against Watin.
Once the web page has been acquired, I use Expression Web to run compatibility checks and identify errors.
I use RegexMagic to remove and correct errors. I really love this tool. Sure, sometimes it make you murderously angry because it doesn't let you do things that should be really easy, but it's a sweet, sweet tool, and the documentation is amazing.
Finally, after all the errors I know have been corrected, I use HTML Agility Pack to convert to XHTML - cross the ts and dot the is, so to speak: all lower case, quotes across attributes, and so on.
Hope this helps!
Avi
Regex can't be used for HTML Cleaning.
Does http://tidy.sourceforge.net/ helps?
If you're scraping a website you don't control, you'll always enter a maintenance mode where you have to fix your scraper every time the layout of the page you're scraping changes. It doesn't matter if you're using the regex <td color="red">\d+</td> to get the big red number from a page or if you're using a DOM parser to get the 3rd cell in the 2nd row in the table with id numbers to get the same. The regex breaks if the webmaster replaces the color attribute with a class attribute. The DOM parser breaks if the webmaster adds another row to the top of the table.
If you're scraping larger parts of a web page and want to embed them in your own web page, it may be easier to get over your desire for web standards compliance and just let the browser figure out how to display things.
Since you're using Html Agility Pack and know of the problems that occur, if you are limited to this known site, why not write your scraper to adjust the problems when you've loaded the HtmlDocument.
i.e.:
If you know the element always appears after the , insert the element into the first child position of the tag.....
In my Delphi program I want to display some information generated by the application. Nothing fancy, just 2 columns of text with parts of words color-coded.
I think I basically have two options:
HTML in a TWebbrowser
RTF in a TRichEdit.
HTML is more standard, but seems to load slower, and I had to deal with The Annoying Click Sound.
Is RTF still a good alternative these days?
Note: The documents will be discarded after viewing.
I would vote for HTML.
I think it is more future oriented. The speed would not concern me.
The question of HTML or RTF may be irrelevant. If they are just used for display purposes, then the file format doesn't matter. It's really just an internal representation. (Are any files even being saved to disk?) I think the question to ask is which one solves the problem with the least amount of work.
I would be slightly concerned that the browser control is changing all the time. I doubt the richedit control will change much. I would lean towards the richedit control because I think there is less that could go wrong with it. But it's probably not a big deal either way.
Have you considered doing an ownerdraw TListView?
I'd also use HTML. Besides, you just got an answer for the clicking sound in TWebBrowser.
If you'd rather not use TWebBrowser, take a look at Dave Baldwin's free HTML Display Components.
I would vote for HTML, too.
We started an app a while ago...
We wanted to
display some information generated by the application. Nothing fancy, just...
(do you hear the bells ring???)
Then we wanted to display more information and style it even more....
...someone decided, that RTF isn't enough anymore, but for backwards compatibility we moved on to MS Word over OLE-Server. That was the end of talking about performance anymore.
I think if we would have done that in HTML it would be much faster now.
RTF is much easier to deal with, as the TRichEdit control is part of every single Windows installation, and has much less overhead than TWebBrowser (which is basically embedding an ActiveX version of Internet Explorer into your app).
TRichEdit is also much easier to use to programmatically add text and formatting. Using the SelStart and SelLength, along with the text Attributes, makes adding bolding and italics, setting different fonts, etc. simple. And, as Re0sless said, TRichEdit can easily be printed while TWebBrowser makes it more complicated to do so.
I would vote RTF as I dont like the fact TWebBrowser uses Internet explorer, as we have had trouble with this in the past on tightly locked down computers.
Also TRichEdit has a print method build in, where as you have to do all sorts of messing about to get the TWebBrowser to print.
Nobody seems to have mentioned a reporting component yet. Yes, it is overkill right now, but if you use it anyway (and maybe you already have got some reporting to do in your app, so the component is already included) you can just display the preview and allow to print / export to pdf later, if it makes any sense. Also if you later decide that you want to have a fancier display there is nothing holding you back.
If both HTML and RTF won't satisfy your need, you could also use an open source text/edit component that supports coloring words or create your own edit component based on a Delphi component.
Another alternative to the HTML browser is the "Embedded Web Browser" components which I used a few projects for displaying html documents to the user. You have complete control over the embedded browser, and I don't recall any clicks when a page is loaded.
I vote for HTML also
RTF is good only for its editor, else then you'd better go standard.
RTF offers some useful text editing options like horizontal tabulator which are not available in HTML. Automatic hyperlink detection is also a nice extra. But I think I would prefer HTML, if these features are not required.
I vote for HTML.
Easier to generate programmatically.
Widely supported.
Since you don't need WYSIWYG capabilities I think HTML advantages trump RTF. Moreover, should the need to export generated data for further, WP-like editing arise, remember that major word processor can open and convert HTML files.
Use HTML, but with 'Delphi Wrapper for Chromium Embedded' by Henri Gourvest , Chromium embedded uses the core that powers Google Chrome.
Don't use TWebBrowser, I'm suffering from all programs that use IE's web control - the font is too small on my 22' monitor with a 1920x1080 resolution, I use Windows 7 and my system's DPI is 150% (XP mode), I tried everything to tweak trying to fix that, no luck...
There is a standard two-pass algorithm mentioned in RFC 1942: http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1942.txt however I haven't seen any good real-world implementations. Anyone know of any? I haven't been able to find anything useful in the Mozilla or WebKit code bases, but I am not entirely sure where to look.
I guess this might actually be a deeper problem with having to actually render HTML (the contents of table cells) but just to keep it simple - plaintext HTML table as an image. Even an HTML table rendering algorithm ignoring the "as an image" part...
If a commercial tool is an option, look at:
HtmlCapture ActiveX Control V2.0 (originally named HtmlSnap)
Some features they claim:
By calling SnapHtmlString(), you can take a snapshot for a html string.
Get snapshot images rendered by either Microsoft IE or Mozilla Firefox.
Just by calling SnapUrl() and SaveImage(), you can take a snapshot of a webpage into various images, such as BMP, JPG, JPEG, GIF, PNG, TIF, TGA and PCX.
Convert html to vector image format like EMF and WMF.
Self contained ActiveX control with no third party dependencies.
Support custom gdi output of the resulting image.
Support saving resulting image both to file and in memory.
Support saving both full-size web page and thumbnail one.
Take a snapshot of a whole webpage into one image without scrollbars.
Make grayscale or B&W images with efficient algorithms to keep the quality.
Support JPEG compression level, compression method selection of TIFF and GIF.
Support setting color depth in images while keeping the quality of the image as much as possible.
Selectively save activeX, image, java applets, scripts and videos on a web page as you want.
Send custom cookies, http headers, credentials in snapshot requests.
Take snapshots of webpages via a Proxy server.
More than 30 samples written in VC, C- , Delphi, VB, C++ Builder, Java, JScript, Perl, VBScript, ASP, ASP.net and PHP are provided.
html table rendering is non-trivial due to the various ways that the sizes of the cells may be specified, tables nested within tables, etc.
if all you want is the image, a simple solution would be the .NET browser control (which is basically the COM component for IE) and a screen-capture function
if you want to get some source to manipulate, the Mozilla source should still be available
I'm not sure if this will meet your constraints or not, but you can try using IE or an IE control with MSHTML and the IHTMLElementRender interface to render the table to a device context.
If you have XHTML, not plain HTML, you should be able to retrieve the content of those cells along with information about the table's structure: colspan, rowspan, etc. Using this information, you can render the table using your own border, padding and margin values.
Things get complex when you also want to render the user defined dimensions. But for retrieving the table data and drawing it, you could use an XML parser. PHP's parser is here: http://ca3.php.net/xml
One tool that comes close is: http://www.terrainformatica.com/htmlayout/main.whtm
This library offers a way to capture rendered HTML to an image, however it is not open source (but free!). Hope it is useful to some!
Unfortunately my app is cross platform, C/C++ with no MFC or platform dependencies (nightmare!). I'm hopefully looking to find a general purpose algorithm for table rendering. I think the 2-pass option from the RFC comes pretty close so I'm probably going to just dig in and work against that. I'll be sure to blog about it and post my eventual solution here if I can!
Take a look at Prince XML - it's a commercial tool to render CSS-styled XML (including XHTML) documents to PDFs. This tool is conform with major W3C standards such as XHTML and CSS2.1. You can try the free demo version from their Homepage!
Since you want an image: It shouldn't be a big problem to convert the generated PDFs programatically to an images.