On Sat, 20 Dec 2003, Michael Campbell wrote:

> First off, is this the place to ask?  If not, apologies, and please point me
> to the right spot.

i'll let someone else answer that.  IMHO ruby has big potential to be a
leading web development tool and being a leading web development tool means
being a leading development tool so discussion on how to get there are on
topic.

> 2 questions:
> 
> 1 Is "span" the recommended way of dumping an element outside of any
> other tags, when no formatting is required (nor desired)?

yes.  also there is <div/>, but IE does funny things with it.  i generally use
div.  note that when a span has no attributes _other_ that 'id' the tag is not
actually included in the output: it's simply a way to include data without
breaking the html files:

  ~/eg/ruby > cat a.rb 
  require 'amrita/template'; include Amrita
  t = TemplateText.new '<span id=foo></span>' 
  t.expand STDOUT, :foo => 42

  ~/eg/ruby > ruby a.rb
  42

> 2 Is there a way to mask out non-data elements if a data-element doesn't
> exist?
> 
> Suppose I have in my html:
> 
> Name: <span id=name></span>
> 
> I don't want "Name:" to show if the :name id doesn't exist.  I'm sure
> I'm overlooking something fundamental here, but I've just started so
> not sure where to look.

simply do not put ':name' into you data structure:

  ~/eg/ruby > cat b.rb
  require 'amrita/template'; include Amrita
  t = TemplateText.new '<span id=foo></span><span id=name>not included</span>' 
  t.expand STDOUT, :foo => 42

  ~/eg/ruby > ruby b.rb
  42

you can use this approach to block out huge portions of html conditionally.

-a
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