Re: Couple of beginner questions

One of the best things that ever happened to me (with regards to writing PHP) was deciding not to embed it in HTML anymore. I either: a) generate the HTML from classes I've built (HTML, Forms, Tables, Images, etc) or use an equivalent PEAR class - or - b) Use Smarty templates...in which I still generate the HTML that will go to the template (where required) with the HTML generation classes. The advantages are abundant. I can't imagine having to maintain some of the code I saw in the examples above. My favorite WTF was with this snippet: $imgHTML = '<img src="' . $url . '" alt="' . $alt . '" title="' . $alt . '" class="' . $imgclass . '" />'; Holy crap...REALLY!? All that string concatenation and there's not even width/height attributes in there! That would look like: $i = new Image('path/to/image/file'); $i->__set(array('class'=>$imgClass, 'alt' => $altText)); $i->toHtml(); Being able to change every image tag in a site by editing the class/method that created is just too big an advantage not to use. Not to mention the auto-generated width/height attributes, the ability to auto-produce thumbnails and fullsize images from a single file... After struggling through the beginnings, I wrote classes to generate basic HTML elements, then tables, then forms, then images. It saved me a bunch of time and taught me to see the website as an application...not as a web-page with pieces of data in it. Somehow, coming to that bit of knowledge was very helpful to my life as a programmer. Good luck, John Corry