html-writing: Writing HTML from SXML🔗ℹ

1 Introduction🔗ℹ

1.1 HTML5 Emphasis🔗ℹ

This package will emphasize HTML5 behavior, now and in the future. Historically, this code was written for HTML 4.x and earlier, and for XHTML. XHTML is no longer supported. Pre-HTML5 HTML will be supported for the forseeable future, except when that conflicts with support for HTML5.

1.2 script Element🔗ℹ

The HTML script element is handled specially, for compatibility with HTML5 and pre-HTML5, as well as an aid for Ractive.js type="text/ractive". Specifically, when the content of the script element contains element SXML and other non-strings, those non-strings are written as what we’ll call “CDATA faux HTML“. In this CDATA faux HTML, strings are written without character entity escaping. This permits, say, the script to be some kind of template that looks like HTML and that contains bits of JavaScript. (We don’t endorse Ractive.js, but supporting script in this way seemed sensible for other reasons, and helped a Racket developer who happened to be using that framework.)

2 Foreign Filters🔗ℹ

3 Low-Level Writing🔗ℹ

4 High-Level Writing🔗ℹ

5 Known Issues🔗ℹ

• Determine whether currently implemented way of handling !DOCTYPE is sufficiently SXML-compliant, before documenting it.

• Move more to pure SXML: remove the support for character literals?

• Move more to pure SXML: consider whether to eliminate & character entity references.

• Many other TODO items from source code.

6 History🔗ℹ

• Version 4:0 — 2016-03-25

  • Restored some undocumented provides that turned out to be used by the html-template package, and added documentation for them. Renamed html->bytes to xexp->html-bytes, and html-attribute-value->bytes to xexp->html-attribute-value-bytes for naming consistency. (Thanks to Sam Tobin-Hochstadt for reporting.)

  • Documentation tweaks.

• Version 3:5 — 2016-03-22

  • Non-CDATA SXML content of the script element is now treated as “CDATA faux HTML”, for the benefit of Ractive.js.

  • Made error message for an attribute not nested in a list say “attribute, not just an attribute name” rather than “valid foreign object”.

  • Made error-html-writing-foreign-filter say “valid SXML object” rather than “valid foreign object”.

• Version 3:4 — 2016-03-22

  • Adding support for using SXML element syntax within script element content, to support Ractive.js type="text/ractive", even though we believe that content to be strictly string CDATA, not DOM elements. Part of the rationale is that this should not conflict with the normal HTML5 uses of script, and it is consistent with older HTML interpretations. (Suggested by Dan Prager.)

  • Removed some vestigal provides, for undocumented identifiers.

  • Organized unit tests a bit.

  • Documentation improvements, including to Known Issues.

• Version 3:3 — 2016-03-21

  • For HTML5 compatibility, the contents of the script element are written without character entity escaping. (Thanks to Daniel Prager.)

  • Fixed bug in which a valid null inside of a list would invoke the foreign filter, rather than being ignored.

  • Added documentation about HTML5 now emphasized by this package.

• Version 3:2 — 2016-03-02

  • Tweaked info.rkt, filenames.

  • Changed “SXML/xexp” references to “SXML”.

• Version 3:1 — 2016-02-25

  • Fixed deps.

• Version 3:0 — 2016-02-25

  • Moving from PLaneT to new package system.

  • Documented foreign filters.

  • Cleaning up documentation for now.

• Version 2:0 — 2012-06-12

  • Heavy API and implementation changes (although the previous version was not really documented), including the following.

  • All out arguments are now mandatory rather than optional.

  • All foreign-filter arguments have been removed.

  • Foreign filter context value symbol renamed from 'attribute (singular) to 'attributes (plural).

  • The suffix /fixed has been removed from all identifiers, since all procedures now have fixed arguments.

  • write-html-attribute-or-list is renamed to write-html-attributes.

  • write-html-attribute-value-string is renamed to write-html-attribute-value-part-string.

  • Added html->bytes and html-attribute-value->bytes.

  • We no longer do backward-compatible XHTML empty element terminators like the string " />"; now they’re just ">".

  • In attribute values, some additional characters are now written as numeric character references: ASCII 0 through 31, and 127.

  • Got rid of the *splice* form that we have experimentally added, and philosophically switched back to SXML’s arbitrarily nested lists for splicing with generally less allocation.

  • Restored some of the handling of unnecessary list nesting in SXML/xexp, which had been removed after forking from HtmlPrag and a brief experiment with *splice* when trying to unify SXML and PLT xexprs.

  • Converted to McFly and Overeasy.

• Version 0.1 — Version 1:0 — 2011-08-21

  • Part of forked development from HtmlPrag, with substantial changes.

7 Legal🔗ℹ

Copyright 2004–2012, 2016 Neil Van Dyke. This program is Free Software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 3 of the License,or (at your option) any later version. This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but without any warranty; without even the implied warranty of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. See http://www.gnu.org/licenses/ for details. For other licenses and consulting, please contact the author.