Re[2]: [lmi] Generating screenshots automatically

[Vadim Zeitlin]

On Sun, 22 Feb 2009 14:13:07 +0000 Greg Chicares <address@hidden> wrote:

GC> I thought you meant you were using some html-template facility already,
GC> and I thought I'd be able to generate the same output without it. But
GC> actually you're using no such facility, so there's none to remove.
GC> 
GC> I guess you thought I wouldn't be satisfied with
GC>   <p>This is an html paragraph.</p>
GC> when one can ornament that in myriad ways with CSS and so on.

 It's true that you almost have to use a template facility if you do use
CSS. But I'd argue that it is useful even when not using CSS as it allows
you to decouple the presentation from code which is a good thing.

GC> In the next section, the objective is merely to produce a hyperlinked
GC> annotation: e.g., to replace the present
GC>   <li><em>ProductName</em>: Product</li>
GC> output by something like this:
GC>   <li><em>ProductName</em>: <a href="X.html#Y">Product</a></li>

 But you could decide to change <em> to <b>. And you may want to put link
around the name and not the description (in fact you almost certainly do as
such long links won't look good). And so on -- all of which is trivial to
do with the template but not so easy when you have to update the code every
time.

 OTOH I do understand that you don't want to introduce a 3rd party
dependency in LMI itself (again, I started from a standalone utility point
of view) so I won't argue any more about this.


GC> >> GC> The problem, though, is that then there's no obvious way to create
GC> >> GC> this html from the WXXRC file.
...
GC> I think we've found the best way:
GC> 
GC>   <object class="wxListBox" name="ProductName">
GC>       <help>Product</help>
GC> +     <lmi:annotation><a 
href="X.html#ProductName">Product</a></lmi:annotation>

 Pedantic note: you need

    +     <lmi:annotation>&lt;a 
href="X.html#ProductName"&gt;Product&lt;/a&gt;</lmi:annotation>

instead.

GC> What's the best way to proceed?

 I'll modify wxXmlResource to allow accessing the custom attributes and
also add support for enumerating all top-level objects in an XRC file to
it. And I hope to do both of those today.

 Of course, I'll [only] test these changes in my standalone program.
Integration with LMI -- if this is what the final decision is -- still
remains to be done and I don't know if you want me to do it (and if so
how/where exactly) or if you prefer to do it yourself.

 Thanks,
VZ