Re: Idea how not to need future enhancement of WML - Environment

[Franz Knipp <nospam@thanx>]

Hello Matthias!

On Mon, 3 Jul 2000, Matthias Bernhardt wrote:
> On Sun, 25 Jun 2000, Franz Knipp wrote:
[ quote deleted ]
> <define-container text>
> <font color="<get-var color>">%body</font>
> </define-container>

I've been sure that somebody will understand the colors like this ;-)

<red> and <blue> are only examples, you can also imagine <table-version>
and <text-version> instead of this, for example...

These two environments should have nothing in common.

The `oldī (pre-mp4h) idea was to define an environment-variable which had
to be evaluated in the following way:

<define-container text>
<if-eq "<get-var env>" "red"  <group
	.... do something ...
>>
<if-eq "<get-var env>" "blue"  <group
	.... do something ...
>>
</define-tag>

As you can imagine, the extension with another environment needed a lot of
work in many tag-definitions and you had to fear to overwrite a working
environment unintentionally.

Therefore I created the idea of environments ;-)

Another point of view: Imagine three different styles for your web-page: a
text-only-version, a compact graphical version and an extensive graphical
version... You want to write the content only once, with normal text,
inside links done with <href>, images with <img> and so on... But
depending on the style the right layout-environment is used. We go a
little bit further: you want to make a rainbow-flower-power style. With
environments you simple add an environment <rainbow> and define
<rainbow:text>, <rainbow:href>, <rainbow:img> ;-)

Let's come to an end: this idea was created more or less in January. Now
we have a <let>-tag and I'll use it for this purpose ;-) because I want to
name my tags as clear as possible, therefore I used, e. g. <ptable:text>
or <ptable:pic> in a <ptable> container - <text> and <pic> would be even
shorter (and ptable stands for phototable) ;-) (and I'll give up the idea
of multi-level environments described in this old mail)

Ok, I hope you understand my idea now

Franz
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