Re: html macro library

Nathan Bubna wrote:
> Kevin said:
> ...
>
> > My experiments to start such a library seem doomed as I would really
> > need to be able to applied recursively so as to embed one tag in
> > another.
>
>
> your experiments are doomed if you believe everything you're told without ever
> questioning it.  there are ways:
>
> #macro( feedmetome $foo )this is $foo#end
> #macro( recursor )
>   #if( $i < 10 )
>     #set( $i = $i + 1 )
>     recursing #recursor()
>   #end
> #end
>
> #set( $bar = "#feedmetome( 'bar' )" )
> #feedmetome( "#feedmetome( $bar )" )
> #set( $i = 1 )
> #recursor()

Nathan,

I did not mean to imply that the above example does not work.

What I meant was that if you write a macro library that largely wraps 
HTML functionality, you will want to be able to pass a block of template 
code to such a macro. IOW, in the general case, you will want for $text in:

#html_href($link, $text)

to be an arbitrary block, possibly containing invocations of other 
macros (for formatting purpose etc.) and so on.

I watch this list off-and-on and I seem to recall this kind of thing 
coming up. I think that recently somebody even implemented a special 
#defineblock macro so that a block could be passed around as a parameter 
in such cases.

> but use Freemarker if it better suits your needs.

The ability to pass in a block (co-routine for language design buffs) as 
a parameter to an FTL macro was introduced in FreeMarker 2.2. See:

http://freemarker.org/docs/dgui_misc_userdefdir.html

This does make certain things possible that would be extremely tortuous 
to implement with Velocimacros -- or even outright impossible.

Regards,

Jonathan Revusky
--
lead developer, FreeMarker project, http://freemarker.org/
FreeMarker-Velocity comparison page: http://freemarker.org/fmVsVel.html

FreeMarker 2.3 pre1 is out!

> Nathan Bubna
> nathan@xxxxxxxx