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From: Kaelin Colclasure <[email protected]>
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Subject: HTML::Subtext 1.03 (first public release)
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Date: 9 Mar 1999 15:57:05 GMT
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HTML::Subtext Version 1.03
Sun Mar  7 14:16:53 PST 1999

   This module is designed to do simple textual substitutions into an
   HTML template document in an "offline" process. It is *not* a
   mechanism for implementing server-side includes -- there are plenty of
   other perl modules that do that. There are also other modules which
   let you embed arbitrary perl expressions in a template. [These are
   quite powerful and useful, but assume a certain sophistication on the
   part of the template author.] HTML::Subtext doesn't do that either.

   What it does do is allow you to compose an HTML document using your
   favorite WYSIWYG HTML editor, include place-holder strings in it like
   "Customer's name here", and then turn those place holders into a
   substitution field by making the text a link to a special 'subtext:'
   URI. This approach has the following advantages:

     1. Any Web server can display the finished documents -- you don't
        need special support for server-side includes, or active server
        pages, or anything beyond plain vanilla HTML. (Of course it is
        still possible to use those features if you have and want them.)
     2. The templates are easy for a non-technical user to prepare
        (in particular a non-perl-literate user).
     3. It's possible to view the template in its unprocessed form, in a
        regular Web browser, and to see where the substituted strings
        will be placed and approximately what your finished document
        will look like.
     4. The substitution mechanism is robust against errors in the
        template specification. That is, the output is still a valid
        HTML document even if some of the substitution field names are
        misspelled or invalid.

   In short, the idea is to make things as simple and convenient as
   possible from the perspective of the template author. I looked through
   a lot of HTML manipulation packages on CPAN, but none of them struck
   me as having quite this goal in mind. [Perhaps this is because the very
   idea of using a template is that you only have to get it right once,
   so power and versatility are more important than convenience. But for
   the particular application I was building at the time, there were a
   number of templates to be built, and they were to be tweaked fairly
   regularly.]

INSTALLATION

   Installation is accomplished in the usual manner-- unpacking the tar
   archive should create a directory called HTML-Subtext-1.03/. cd into
   this directory and issue the following commands:

     perl Makefile.PL
     make
     make test

   Assuming all the tests succeed, you may require root or administrator
   privledges on your system for the final step:

     make install

   It's possible to make use of the module without installing it. See the
   perl documentation on @INC for details.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

   The implementation of this module was almost trivially simple, thanks
   to the excellent work of Gisle Aas (and others) on the HTML::Parser
   and URI modules.

--------

NAME
   HTML::Subtext - Perform text substitutions on an HTML template

SYNOPSIS
     use HTML::Subtext;
     %context = ( ... ); # Hash of names to substitution text
     $p = HTML::Subtext->new('CONTEXT' => \%context);
     $p->parse_file("template.html");

DESCRIPTION
   `HTML::Subtext' is a package for performing text substitutions
   on a specially formatted HTML template. The template uses normal
   HTML markup, but includes links of the form:

     <a href="subtext:foo/bar">This text will be replaced</a>

   The URI in this link tells `HTML::Subtext' to check in the
   provided hash `'CONTEXT'' for a key named `'foo/bar''. If this
   lookup succeeds in producing a string value, the text in the
   body of the link is replaced by that value.

EXAMPLES
   This example performs substitutions into a template embedded
   into the Perl code as a *here-document*.

     use HTML::Subtext;

     %context = (
       'author/name' => 'Kaelin Colclasure',
       'author/email' => '<a href="mailto:[email protected]">[email protected]</a>'
     );

     $p = HTML::Subtext->new('CONTEXT' => \%context);
     $p->parse(<<EOT);
     <html><head><title>example</title></head><body>
     <a href=\"subtext:author/name\">Author's name here</a>
     <a href=\"subtext:author/email\">mailto: link here</a>
     </body></html>
     EOT

   When run, the example produces the following output:

     <html><head><title>example</title></head><body>
     Kaelin Colclasure
     <a href="mailto:[email protected]">[email protected]</a>
     </body></html>

SEE ALSO
   the HTML::Filter manpage, the HTML::Parser manpage

COPYRIGHT
   Copyright 1999 Kaelin Colclasure.

   This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or
   modify it under the same terms as Perl itself.

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