Mixed feelings on this one, though mainly I got pretty far ahead of myself. I've abandoned AdLib, because it was too much work and just not enough return, and I finally decided that, yes, it was indeed reinventing the wheel. I may as well explain what I had.

The idea was, you could take a generic page with some named placeholders in it, and replace those placeholders with values (either resulting from a CGI script or directly from Apache via GET and POST... which was why I wanted to do an Apache module). You might also have a definitions file somewhere else with blocks of content that you'd inline into the page (I'll give an example below). I called it "CSS for content", but the analogy "CSS is to styles as AdLib is to content" probably fits better, because you'd take oft-used blocks of HTML and place them in a file, and refer to them in a page if you wanted them in the page. I'll write out that example now...

?>
~..Body..~

~..Footer..~

~..Footer..~

The ~..placeholders..~ surrounding blocks of content define and name those blocks. So, given that definitions file, you might do something like this to create a page using those definitions.

~??Header??~~??Body??~~??Body??~~??Footer??~

The ~??placeholder??~ signified an inlining of a definition, and a ~!!placeholder!!~ inlines a value rather than a definition (say, from GET or POST, or from some other method). It's probably not hard to see how the page would have looked.

Another idea I had was that the AdLib engine might not just be used for output like that, but also input. You'd have a definitions file (possibly the same one used for output), and it would parse the page, matching the page back into the content blocks and coming up with the ~!!placeholder!!~ values that were used on the page. Used that way, it wouldn't be very different from taking two identical papers with identical words, cutting out a few words on one, and placing it over the other so you could see the words used on the back page.

Actually, that idea is what made me start on AdLib in the first place... I had a file I needed to get stuff from - a really, really big file - that did not lend itself to typical parsing. But every "page" in the file had either one kind of information or another kind, so I could split it into parts like that. In the end, though, it would have been just too much effort for not enough return.


At least that's one project off my shoulders. [grin]
~Jonathan