Templates XML conformance

Fournier Daniel <[email protected]> Wed, 05 May 2004 16:30:10 +0200

Newsgroups	gmane.comp.cms.xaraya.ui
Organization	Xaraya News Server
Message-ID	<[email protected]>

The use of XML for Xaraya templates is a nice idea: during the 
development stage, one can validate them with ordinary XML tools.

Unfortunatly, Xaraya_Classic theme default.xt template is not XML 
conformant.

For instance, it uses an XML entity (&xar-baseurl;) to reference the 
site base URL. However this entity is not defined within any ENTITY 
declaration. How is this entity defined? Is it just a pseudo entity 
replaced in the PHP processing of the template?

Another XML conformance violation is the DOCTYPE declaration for HTML, 
which should come before document root element.
Why not use a true DOCTYPE declaration for the template and modify it to 
have the right HTML DOCTYPE including the baseurl entity declaration 
when compiling the template.

The template prolog could be:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE xar:blocklayout
[
<!ENTITY xar-baseurl "$xar-baseurl">
]>
<?xar type="page" ?>
....

after compilation:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" 
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd"
[
<!ENTITY xar-baseurl "http://www.myxarsite.com/">
]>

....

Another problem is the multiplication of elements with identical id 
attributes. For instance: <td id="leftmenus">. ID attributes have to be 
unique in the document. Probably a class attribute instead of an id (is 
this id used somewhere in the document processing?) would suffice.


Daniel Fournier