Re: heredoc usage [WAS: <OPTION]

At 10/26/2006 08:24 AM, tedd wrote:

At 1:04 AM -0700 10/26/06, Paul Novitski wrote:

My comparable example (but in an HTML context) would look like:

        Hello <span class="firstName">FIRSTNAME</span>,

where the engine replaces the content of the span with the value from the database based on a match of 'span.firstName' or perhaps just '.firstName'. (In this example the 'FIRSTNAME' content in the template is merely a place-holder to make it easier to preview the markup and isn't necessary to the merge process.)

I think a <div> would work just as well -- <span> seems so old-world to me. :-)

By default, div is a block element and span is inline, so span seemed like the natural fit for a sentence fragment. I don't think there's anything old-world (!) about spans, Tedd, they're just tags. I use both in my markup with a clear conscience.

However, if you used preg_match_all, I think you could do away with the spans all together by matching FIRSTNAME to your first name variable. That way your document would simply read:

       Hello FIRSTNAME

That's true, and in tighly-defined micro-contexts that might work just fine. For a robust general CMS, though, I want a completely unambiguous demarcation of replacable content. All-caps tags will work in some circumstances but certainly won't in others. Regards, Paul