[plt-scheme] Homepages in Scheme

From: Prabhakar Ragde (plragde at uwaterloo.ca)
Date: Thu May 27 13:08:26 EDT 2004

>For my money, I find WebIt's pattern matching transformations much
>easier to deal with than SSAX's pre-post-order tree traversal stuff,
>but this is purely subjective I imagine.

In further defense of WebIt!, I recently used it to define SXML for
two projects, one a course Web page (output HTML), and one a system to
generate presentation transparencies, handouts, and instructor notes
from a single source (output LaTeX). In both cases I expect others to
write or modify very simple SXML, for example:

(slide title: "Example"
  (p "This is the first slide of the talk.")
  (enumerate
    (item "First item.")
    (item "Second item.")))

For the Web page, see http://www.student.cs.uwaterloo.ca/~cs135 .

Not really knowing what I was doing, it took less than a day's work
for each of the two systems, using examples from Jim Bender and Noel
Welsh. It's true that documentation is sparse for WebIt!, but this
seems to be true for anything using macros. (Someday I will understand
them...)

>> I also find it aggravating that I must prefix my HTML
>> commands with h4 in Webit! whereas in SXML I can
>> simply list the HTML command.

The above example shows that useful HTML tags like "p" can be reused
for one's own purposes, which I suppose is the whole point of
namespaces. --PR


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