On 8/21/09 4:06 PM, Aryeh Gregor wrote:
What are other people's thoughts on what a nice interface would look like here? (Other than "PHP should have named parameters like Python"? :) ) Xml is very inconsistent on this score, and it would be nice if we had a consistent format for Html.
Most of the Xml:: wrappers are about as consistent as I think you can reasonably get without giving everything the same form as not having defaults, overall. :)
The Xml:: and Html:: functions are fairly low-level; we've also now got the HtmlForm class, which Andrew built for the Special:Preferences rewrite.
This gives you a way to build a form descriptively, including specifying input validation and giving a clean way for extensions to add things to your form...
My inclination is that most UI code should be using HtmlForm or something like it to define its form structure, and not be building forms from scratch (whether out of raw HTML strings or building them element-by-element with helper functions).
-- brion