On one hand, I prefer to have a properly formatted code, but on the other, most systems i have worked with have a very high cost of string concatenation, and I have a strong suspicion PHP is guilty of that too. Constructing HTML one element/value at a time might prove to be on of the bigger perf bottlenecks.
From my personal experience, once I worked on a networking lib for
proprietary protocol, and noticed that there was a lot of logging calls in the form of Log("value1=" + value1 + " value2=" + value2 ...). After I switched it to the form "Log("value1={0}, value2={1}", value1, value2), the code became an order of magnitude faster because the logging framework deferred concatenation until the last moment after it knew that logging is needed, and the actual concatenation was done for the whole complex string with values, not one substring at a time.
On Mon, May 13, 2013 at 6:10 PM, Antoine Musso hashar+wmf@free.fr wrote:
Le 13/05/13 19:26, Max Semenik a écrit :
Hi, I've seen recently a lot of code like this:
$html = Html::openElement( 'div', array( 'class' => 'foo' ) . Html::rawElement( 'p', array(), Html::element( 'span', array( 'id' => $somePotentiallyUnsafeId ), $somePotentiallyUnsafeText ) ) . Html::closeElement( 'div' );
IMO, cruft like this makes things harder to read and adds additional performance overhead.
Html is just like our Xml class, that let us raise the probability that the result code will be valid. That is also a good way to make sure the content is properly escaped, though in the example above that could lead to some mistake due to all the nested calls.
For the performance overhead, it surely exist but it is most probably negligible unless the methods are in a heavily used code path.
Ideally we would use templates to generate all of that. That will let us extract the views logic out of the PHP code.
-- Antoine "hashar" Musso
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