Using the Pajes HTML Classes Directly

The underlying Pajes architecture employs a set of classes to manipulate and generate HTML. It is these classes that allow the developer the freedom to programmatically manage the flexible creation of browser responses.

These HTML classes are available for use directly by the developer, with or without the use of the Pajes templating engine. When employed this way, Pajes behaves like a number of other HTML class oriented tools. This approach may be better suited to some developers or application requirements.

Why use HTML Classes?

Anyone who has ever needed to restructure a complex HTML page, particularly one containing nested tables, will know that it can be a time consuming and frustrating operation. Even the initial creation can be laborious.

Use of HTML classes to build and maintain pages eliminates much of this effort and results in more structured code. As an example, consider the creation of an HTML table.

The usual approach is to prepare strings containing row and cell tags with attributes and cell contents sprinkled throughout and indentation that scrolls off the developer's page. The process inevitably tends to involve some trial & error and the addition of a new column or movement of an embedded table to a new location involves trawling through matched tag pairs to perform cut and paste operations.

In the HTML class approach, you instantiate a table object via one of a number of constructors. Addition of rows and columns, or setting of attributes and content is then achieved through table object methods. The resultant generated table will never be missing a tag or contain a misspelling and restructure of the table is a matter of a change to a constructor, method call or loop operation. More importantly you have programmatic facilities to dynamically generate and manipulate objects such as HTML tables, making the difficult simpler and the impossible possible.