I was reading through the PHP/Mysql tutorial for database driven websites and I must make an observation.
Part of the tutorial talks about setting it up to where you needed to know zero html for the article submitter to be able to get it to format. The only problem I see is that all you are doing is replacing html with other tag like code. This seems unecessary to me as alot of people already know basic html needed to format text and if they don't they still have to know the code you come up with. Wouldn't it just be easier to give the submitter a cheat sheet on html then to have to give them instructions on how to add something that you made up off the top of your head?
I may be wrong but are there any other advantages to doing this rather than just using basic html?
Well, if all you need to do is display static pages, then HTML is just fine. If you want "dynamic content," then you need something else. PHP is a pretty good way to achieve that.
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"Whatever can be said can be said clearly." -- Ludwig Wittgenstein
I don't think you understand my question. I was talking about using PHP and a database. When I talk about html I am talking about what is being used to format the articles being submitted to the site using php.
You have a good point but I must say typing {url=www.yahoo.com} is much easier than typing <a href="http://www.yahoo.com/">.
As for {b} and {i}, there's really no difference. I think that you have to go one way though (either HTML or custom markup) and {url} was clearly easier and <a href>.
Consider also the fact that allowing an inexperienced HTML coder to input HTML-formatted content into your site could be a recipe for disaster! With a few wrong table tags, they could completely mess up the page layout of your site!
By creating a custom formatting language as I've described in the series, you constrain authors to using the limited set of formatting tools you provide them. This guarantees that they will be unable to do anything to disrupt the pages into which this content will be inserted.
A limited tag set also allows you to put a "cheat sheet" on the content submission page for authors to refer to. Granted, you could just as easily provide a cheat sheet for the basic HTML tags, but as d3v mentioned above, a custom language allows you to simply many things for authors.
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