Re: [DotGNU]Call for volunteers: HTML pretty printer

[j_post]

On Tuesday 27 May 2003 08:20 pm, Gopal wrote:
> I gotta really ask you this ... why did you write your own scanner for
> C# ?.. I think you could have gotten away with a simple flex scanner
> and saved a lot of work and code as well.
>
Because it was fun, and because I don't speak flex.

> You could have gotten away with just
> #define CLOSE_AND_OPEN(stream,type,color) \
>       if(previous!=TOK_##type)\
>       { \
>               CSSrcGenClosingTag(previous);\
>               CSSrcGenOpeningTag(TOK_##type);\
>               previous = TOK_#type;\
>       }\

How is that functionally different from my code? Different tactic, same 
strategy.
>
> You have spent such a lot of work on the scanner , that HTML gen has
> suffered

How so?

> I can only say that I don't like the HTML it generates ..

It's standard HTML, no frills--should be viewable on any browser (which seems 
to me to be an important goal).

>Your code seems to have gone too deep into <font> hell :-)

Example please? Can't change color without a <font color=...>. Where is an 
unnecessary <font...> generated?
>
> Convert all \n into <br/> and all tabs into &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
> etc...

Not compatible with <pre>. Try it. May work on some browsers, but not on all. 
Konqueror, for example, will display "&nbsp" instead of a space (when within 
a <pre> block). '\n' is not at all the same thing as <br> whether or not 
<pre> is used.
>
> You might even define the formatting as classes and use a .css file to
> set the colors & highlights instead of hard-coding them in HTML ..
>
Yeah, that could be done. But it's a really simple program, and anyone can 
modify the colors and recompile. Seems to me that having a few colors and one 
highlight specified in a separate file would not be a simplification, but a 
complification. Matter of opinion, I suppose.
>
> Gopal

Feel free to write your own version of cssrc2html. I'm just trying to help. 
If you can do a better job, and no doubt you can, then do so.

Jeff