[Catalyst] FormHandler -- pro or con?

[Sir Robert Burbridge]

On 12/10/2010 01:33 PM, Erez Schatz wrote:
> On 9 December 2010 16:32, Sir Robert Burbridge<rburbrid at cisco.com>  wrote:
>
>    
>> Ideally, the web designers that don't know Perl at all should be able to
>> change the design of the forms at least.
>>
>>
>> Maybe I'm being naive, but what does the HFH form have to do with the
>> design?  If you give them meaningful ids and class names, the designers can
>> do whatever they need with CSS and the templates, right?
>>      
> That's the main issue with these html generators, the programmers
> create the code in a nice Perl class, and then the generator does its
> magic, which includes a lot of stuff the designer later have to
> handle, but can't, unless you're willing to make everything
> display:absolute with fixed locations. The only way to force a layout
> on the generator is to override it and manually write the html, which
> is somewhat silly considering the purpose of using a generator in the
> first place.
>    
Fair enough.  I guess I just never ran into this problem.  We've tended 
to try to make the html purely semantic, which has gone a long way.  On 
the other hand, we have (semantically meaningful) manual renderings of 
our forms in templates, then just [% INCLUDE 
form/whatever/do_something.tt %] whenever we need it (sometimes with 
context-specific params), so it's not really HFH rendering, but TT.

-Sir