Re: Web development

[MJ Ray]

> Actually, I'm going to fix this right away rather than continue with
> my stupid homework about Kant and Carnap and Quine.  ;)

Heh, thanks.  ;-)  As soon as the project I'm currently working on is
deployed, I'm going to have to take a more serious look at HB and a few
others.

> Now what other wrapper function do you want me to write!  :)

Just the modules and .scm handler ;-)

>     What happens if there is no width argument [and you call
>     (hb-argument hbargs "width")]?
> If no width argument was specified when your object was invocated,
> hb-argument returns #<undefined> (SCM_UNDEFINED in C).

I suppose I ought to know how to test for that, but it misses me at 3am :-/

>     Have you considered using <?hb...?> tags, which I think may be
>     syntactically cleaner?
> Hmm.
> Why would they be syntactically cleaner?
> This shouldn't be hard to implement, but I am unconvinced.  Convince
> me?  :)

Well, you're inventing extra xhtml tags which I suspect may be technically
illegally formed by having + as the first character.  At the very least, you
are invading the namespace of xhtml so that it can't be validated.

I'm not entirely convinced that using <?...?>, which I believe to be XML
processing instructions are any neater.  It is probably best to create a
per-server namespace with the prefix hb or similar and adjust the headers
accordingly.  That is, tags would become <hb:hello /> and similar.

On reflection, I suspect namespaces are the simplest way to go for HB.  I
haven't checked whether automated tools like w3c's Tidy can cope with xhtml
extended in this way, though.

> I'll see if I get some time next week to make a few benchmarks

That would be interesting reading, especially for others here.

> I'm not sure what happens when all the pages are dynamical and have
> stuff such as access counters or generate statistics (at HB's side),
> but your suggestion is very interesting nonetheless. :)

Well, this is another interesting question: at what level does HB cache
objects, if at all?  Most dynamic elements have at least some component
which is cacheable, other than toys like access counters, so could
reasonably set a cache time and cut down the amount of work needed to
produce each page.

Of course, such caches can be implemented at the level of the application
which runs on top of HB if we can create new modules, as you have already
indicated.
-- 
MJR