[Petal] Processing HTML

[Jean-Michel Hiver]

William McKee wrote:

>Hi Jean-Michel,
>
>I'm working on writing some reviews about Petal for CPAN and a wiki that
>I frequent[1]. In so doing, I was reading your Summary from the pod and
>have a question about the following line:
>
>  "Petal is a XML based templating engine that is able to process any
>  kind of XML, XHTML and HTML."
>
>Now, to my understanding, I'm under the impression that Petal cannot do
>HTML without the help of HTML::TreeBuilder. This requires the use of
>Petal::Parser::HTB, right? Should that line be rephrased or a footnote
>added to explain how HTML is handled?
>  
>
I suppose this is deprecated. I'll have to update the docs.

I am really sorry I am unable to support the HTML parser as it should 
be. I would like to hightlight that:

* We do not use HTML anywhere in MKDoc, only XML / XHTML. Hence HTML is 
of no interest to me. It was just put there merely as a niceness / proof 
of concept of the multiple parsing backend functionality.

* I am in the process of re-factoring MKDoc into a bunch of modules and 
releasing them on CPAN, which simply takes enormous amounts of time.

* I have to do some paid work sometimes too, and there's only so many 
hours in the day.

So I am really sorry to say this, but it seems you might have to solve 
this on your own for now. Although I would really like to be nice to 
everybody and fix these HTML issues, I simply cannot afford it right 
now. Sorry!

If anybody volunteers to take over Petal::Parser::HTB or write an 
alternative HTML parser, those efforts would be very welcome indeed and 
I would be happy to answer any questions on the Petal parsing backend to 
the best of my knowledge. But for now I can't really provide much more.

>I cringe to bring up this issue since I know you're hesitant to continue
>supporting Petal::Parser::HTB. Is anyone else on the list using a
>version of Petal <2.00 or using the HTB parser with Petal 2+? I'm
>slowing bringing some of my original websites up to well-formed XHTML
>but haven't even switched my production server to 2.02 yet so am not
>ready for losing access to HTB.
>  
>
Well, see above...

Best Regards,
Jean-Michel.