Monday, May 25, 2009

CSS Aggregation, Themeing, Entities

Recently I fixed a few things that have been in the way of really creating functional websites. These included CSS Aggregation (required for dynamic themeing), Theme configuration files, and the ability to use common html entities from waxml files. CSS aggregation was a necessary feature because the aggregator would be responsible for applying the current theme colors and styles to other resources. With this functionality, controls can be designed to inherit information like color, border, and recommended padding size from the theme configuration file. An example of a theme configuration file can be seen here. Another irritating bug was the inability to use HTML entities like   and © within the waxml template files. This was due to the fact that these entities are not defined in the used XML schema. The workaround involved preprocessing the template files to replace common HTML entities with their ASCII counterparts. The XMLFixEntities function can be seen here, starting on line 20. Some reorganization of functions might be in order to separate the template loader from the Page object.

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