[jsr-314-open] Facelets: XHTML vs. XML

[Dan Allen]

On Tue, May 12, 2009 at 3:47 PM, Martin Marinschek
<mmarinschek at apache.org>wrote:

> Hi Andy,
>
> one more issue which _always_ comes up with people working with
> facelets and of course also stems from the same root-cause is the
> comment-problem - how can you correctly have comments for facelets and
> comments for the output?
>
> The way we currently do this is either set SKIP_COMMENTS to true -
> which effectively disallows HTML comments - or use ui:remove to make
> parts of the page Facelets-comments. However, the second approach
> doesn't allow invalid XML-snippets inside the ui:remove section - and
> this can be a very annoying thing then.
>
> Maybe it would be better to set SKIP_COMMENTS to true by default - and
> then have an <h:outputComment> for emitting HTML comments (I believe
> the problem of invalid XML in HTML-comments is not as big as in
> comments which are meant to be there for facelets).


Martin, you have struck a very strong chord with me. I was just dealing with
this exact issue all week. To create a real Facelets comment, putting
SKIP_COMMENTS aside, I have to do:

<ui:remove><!--
I'm thinking of using <rich:dataTable> but I haven't added the RichFaces
libraries yet.
--></ui:remove>

To me, that seems like complete overkill. I would much prefer if Facelets
just stayed out of comments and like Martin said, we consider producing a
comment with a tag (since producing a comment is extremely rare anyway). I
would even support the idea of using comment markers inside the tag so that
it is still possible to use invalid XML.

<h:outputComment><!--
This is a comment with invalid <<XML>>
--></h:outputComment>

Of course, the comment markers would be optional...they just allow the
template to be well-formed XML if you happen to use invalid markup in the
comment.

-Dan

-- 
Dan Allen
Senior Software Engineer, Red Hat | Author of Seam in Action

http://mojavelinux.com
http://mojavelinux.com/seaminaction
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