I’ve started modifying “Simon Willison’s form class”:http://simon.incutio.com/archive/2003/06/17/theHolyGrail today - I’d been thinking about doing something along these lines for a long time, but hadn’t ever got started on it. Existing code has got me past that stage, and so I should have something working within the next year (!). I’ve planned out exactly what I want it to do and how it should behave (plans all in my head at the moment, not got round to writing it down) but whether I can implement it remains to be seen (like as not I’ll lose patience before I’ve finished).
Looking at the code though made me wish for PHP5 and the SimpleXML extension, which is going to be a great help (as an aside, I like to claim that I indirectly brought this extension about - I posted the link to “Native XML Scripting”:http://dev2dev.bea.com/articlesnews/discussion/thread.jsp?thread=JSchneider_XML before anyone else did - as a comment to a post either in “Simon Willison’s weblog”:http://simon.incutio.com or over at “PHPEverywhere”:http://php.weblogs.com, and I believe Sam Ruby picked it up from there. Only I can’t find that comment now…). The current SAX approach is OK, but you can’t argue that it’s intuitive, and it needs too much code writing to do a simple job.
Oh, and I’ll get round to finishing this site design one day soon…