Stylesheets for the error display?: msg#00258 web.mason.user

Hi,

Recently I've been busy moving all the markup from HTML to CSS in my
Mason-based system, and I suddenly realized that the errors that are
displayed are full of HTML-based markup (tables, font tags, etc).

For my development systems I'm running with:

'error_format' => 'html',
'error_mode' => 'output',

And these errors are thus shown "inline", somewhere in the page, meaning
that my HTML is suddenly disrupted by HTML such as this:

<html><body>
<p align="center"><font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"><b>System error</b></font></p>
<table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="1">
<tr>
<td nowrap="nowrap" align="left" valign="top"><font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="-2"><b>error:</b> </font></td>
<td align="left" valign="top"><font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="-2">Month '-1' out of range 0..11 at /web/backend-perl/docs/cmos-dev/cosmos/tts/edit.html line 128<br></font></td>

Now, of course I'm fully aware that such errors shouldn't appear at all,
after all - they're bugs in my code. But the fact is that they are displayed,
and they can become quite unreadable at times (depending on the component were
the error appears), or simply use up a lot of screenspace. Also, I rarely need
the raw error output. But the other information can be quite useful, also
for others (to report the error to me).

I believe there should be a 'html_css' (or such) error_mode parameter, that
doesn't contain all this markup, and contain the right style-classes to let
the developer (or author) determine the markup.

For example, instead of (from Exceptions.pm):

----------------------------------------------------------------------
<tr>
<td align="left" valign="top" nowrap="nowrap"><b>code stack:</b> </td>
<td align="left" valign="top" nowrap="nowrap">
% foreach my $frame (@{$info->{frames}}) {
<% $frame->filename |h %>:<% $frame->line |h %><br>
% }
</td>
</tr>
</table>

<a href="#raw">raw error</a><br>

<br>
....
----------------------------------------------------------------------

Something like:

----------------------------------------------------------------------

<div id="mason-raw-error" class="mason-raw-error">
<div id="mason-codestack-description" class="mason-error-description">code stack:</div>
<div id="mason-codestack-error" class="mason-error-data">
% foreach my $frame (@{$info->{frames}}) {
<% $frame->filename |h %>:<% $frame->line |h %><br>
% }
</div>
</div>

<a class="mason-raw-output-dump" href="#mason-raw-output">raw error</a><br>

<div id="mason-raw-spacer" class="mason-raw-spacer">
<br />
</div>

% my $raw = $error->raw_text;
% HTML::Mason::Escapes::basic_html_escape(\$raw);
% $raw =~ s/\t//g;

<a id="mason-raw-output" name="mason-raw-output"></a>

<div id="mason-raw-output-dump" class="mason-raw-output-dump">
<% $raw |h %>
</div>

----------------------------------------------------------------------

Then, authors could simply add the required styles to their stylesheets
to totally hide some or more blocks from the error output, or to set
other styles to make it friendlier to those who have to be able to read
the errors:

#mason-raw-output-dump { display: none; }
#mason-raw-spacer { display: none; }
.mason_error_description { font-weight: bold; }

A sample stylesheet could of course provide defaults equivalent to the
error_mode => 'html', as a starting point.

Even crazier stuff should be possible too, when using a decent browser
with *proper* CSS support (which excludes Internet Exploder, mostly):

#mason-error {
position: fixed;
top: 110px;
left: 150px;
background: #eee;
border: 1px solid black;
}

And that would put the error right there, floating in a fixed position on
your screen. Or anywhere else you'd like.

A 'html_css' mode might save others the effort of having to add their own
exception-method, just to have a different layout for the errors. It's
what CSS is made for anyway ... but I don't know how well browsers will
cope with the disrupted structure of the document (after all, the error
can occur somewhere in the middle of your page). My own CSS still seems to
apply well anyway after an error.

Good idea? Bad idea? I suppose I could provide a patch some time, but I'd
have to make it first. :)

Grtz,
Pascal

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