Rose::HTML::Objects 0.547

Rose::HTML::Objects is a Perl object-oriented interfaces for HTML.

SYNOPSIS

use Rose::HTML::Form;

$form = Rose::HTML::Form->new(action => /foo,
method => post);

$form->add_fields
(
name => { type => text, size => 20, required => 1 },
height => { type => text, size => 5, maxlength => 5 },
bday => { type => datetime },
);

$form->params(name => John, height => 6ft, bday => 01/24/1984);

$form->init_fields();

$bday = $form->field(bday)->internal_value; # DateTime object

print $bday->strftime(%A); # Tuesday

print $form->field(bday)->html;

The Rose::HTML::Object::* family of classes represent HTML tags, or groups of tags. These objects allow HTML to be arbitrarily manipulated, then serialized to actual HTML (or XHTML). Currently, the process only works in one direction. Objects cannot be constructed from their serialized representations. In practice, given the purpose of these modules, this is not an important limitation.

Any HTML tag can theoretically be represented by a Rose::HTML::Object-derived class, but this family of modules was originally motivated by a desire to simplify the use of HTML forms.

The form/field object interfaces have been heavily abstracted to allow for input and output filtering, inflation/deflation of values, and compound fields (fields that contain other fields). The classes are also designed to be subclassed. The creation of custom form and field subclasses is really the "big win" for these modules.

There is also a simple image tag class which is useful for auto-populating the width and height attributes of img tags. Future releases may include object representations of other HTML tags. Contributions are welcome.