Re: mod_include.c and conditional html

[Dean Gaudet <dg...@wired.com>]

In message <19...@volterra.ai.mit.edu>, Robert S. Thau writes:
>Hmmm... the problem with the Spinner language, from our point of view,
>is that it *doesn't* include the old-style <!--#foo--> directives which
>everyone and their dog already has megabytes of.

We have a lot of <!--#foo--> as well, so I'm still supporting that.

The SSI+ language does not look abstract enough (i.e. you do direct comparisons
against USER_AGENT rather than testing abstract properties).  I'm also not
enamoured with goto in a preprocessor.

<!--#foo--> has a few advantages over <foo>:

- according to html syntax, you can use '>' as an operator inside <!--#foo-->
    since > can appear inside a comment
- it is less likely to conflict with future client-supported tags

On the other hand, <foo> is far easier to type.

Spinner's <if> ... </if> <else> ... </else> is arguably confusing
-- I haven't tried to find out what happens if you insert something
between </if> and <else>.  But I think it's less confusing than using
a goto and label scheme.

>From my point of view <if> ... <elseif> ... <else> ... </if>  would be
least confusing, but doesn't fit into the whole html scheme.

Dean