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htmlseaside

Any reason not to write my own HTML?

In Seaside, in all those renderContentOn: methods, I can use the HTML canvas object to assemble my DOM tree.

I am writing a bunch of helpers for my components currently, because I'm using Twitter Bootstrap for the styling and don't want to write all that boilerplate code (<div>s en mas) all the time.

For the way this is setup, the easiest way for me is to simply (I want to avoid using with: aBlock in those helpers) write out the HTML for the wrapping DIVs like this:

html html: '<div class="control-group">'.

Is there any reason for me not to do this? Any downsides?

Solution

  • There are various advantages in using the HTML canvas:

    • The HTML canvas ensures valid tags, a valid tag structure, that all tags are properly closed (at compile time), and that contents is properly escaped.
    • The HTML canvas ensures valid attributes, that all attributes are properly closed, and that contents is properly escaped.
    • As a consequence of the above two the HTML canvas automatically avoids the possibility of cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerabilities.
    • The HTML canvas enables better reusability by enabling composition of tags (simple function calls), presenters (renderOn: in Objects), and components (renderContentOn: of components).
    • The HTML canvas avoids generating unnecessary whitespaces.
    • The use of HTML canvas enables one to use the standard tools the Smalltalk IDE provides on HTML code: senders, implementors, refactoring engine (extract to method, extract to component, inline method, automatic rewrite, ...), etc.

    I agree that in some rare cases it is not worth to use HTML canvas: For example, when large static junks coming from an external source need to be embedded into a page.