Re: scheme -> (X)HTML

[Paul Emsley <paul.emsley@bioch.ox.ac.uk>]

Julian Graham wrote:
> On Tue, Mar 25, 2008 at 3:37 PM, Paul Emsley <paul.emsley@bioch.ox.ac.uk> wrote:
>
>   
>>  Dear Guilers,
>>
>>  I have in mind to write a little script that makes a web page about the state of
>>  various files.
>>
>>  I'd like to use some schemey way of doing this.  s-expression -> HTML perhaps.
>>
>>  What is the thinking guile-user's way of approaching this?
>>     
>
> Hi Paul,
>
> There are several good tools out there for doing this: Oleg Kiselyov
> has written a Scheme-based port of SAX called SSAX [1] that can read
> and emit S-expressions in a format he calls SXML.  It's available for
> Guile as part of Andy Wingo's guile-lib [2].  For permissive HTML
> parsing, Neil Van Dyke has written HtmlPrag [3].  And if you're
> interested in a more DOM-based approach, I've got a module called SDOM
> [4].
>
> Hope that helps!
>
> Regards,
> Julian
>
>
> [1]: http://okmij.org/ftp/Scheme/SXML.html
> [2]: http://home.gna.org/guile-lib/
> [3]: http://www.neilvandyke.org/htmlprag/
> [4]: http://www.nongnu.org/sdom/
>
>   

Hi Julian,

Thank you and others for replying to my query.

I looked at [1] and [2] in your list - I didn't want to parse XML - not 
yet anyway.

Trying [1] I found that Oleg made me jump through hoops with his 
idiosyncratically organised
web pages.  That put me off a bit.  When I tried his code, it was not 
clear to me where the output
was going.  So I tried [2].  I ended up using [2] because I like reading 
Andy Wingo's blog and
it just worked out of the box anyway.

It was such fun!  I've not quasiquoted so deeply before. I'm still 
tinkering with the script - I use
it to see how my hetrogeneous overnight builds got on.

code here:
http://coot.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/build-web-page-builder.scm
results here:
http://www.ysbl.york.ac.uk/~emsley/coot/build-info.html

(Incidentally, the FC3 build seems to fail because guile-gtk-2.1 fails 
to build (it fails in make, not
configure.  Is guile-gtk-2.1 supposed to work on gtk+-2.4?  ... not 
completely the right place to
ask, I guess).

I have a question about the output.  How do I put line breaks into the 
generated text?  All on one
line is fine for my browser - but makes it hard to eyeball the HTML.

After I wrote it (and saw how concise the sxml translator was), I though 
"so what's all the fuss
about PHP?" One of the major things, perhaps, is the generation of 
images in-line.  So I thought
"couldn't guile+sxml do something similar making SVGs on the fly?"  Is 
that being quietly coded
up by someone? Making a few graphs on the fly shouldn't be so hard, 
should it?  In fact, I was
even thinking of doing it myself :)

Regards,

Paul.