RE: [boost] Re: [Output Formatter]: Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)proposal

From: Reece Dunn (msclrhd_at_[hidden])
Date: 2004-09-18 13:32:35

Tony Juricic wrote:
>My few cents:
>Serialization, iostreams, Spirit (great piece of code!) and new Output
>Formatter overlap enough in certain segments that, IMO, serious thought
>should be given to combining them in the best possible way; i.e. maintain
>the simplicity and specific target of each module while, eventually,
>promoting overlap areas into the new libraries.

The iostreams library simplifies creating custom stream types. This will 
interact with the others since it provides the C++ I/O stream interface.

I am not overly familiar with the Serialization library, but IIUC, the 
archive objects use stream objects to perform the back-end I/O. It provieds 
support for circular data structures.

Spirit is a generic parser creator. This is focused on input only. Also, I 
have found it needs quite a bit of code to bind a data type to the parser 
(e.g. reading in a pair of values).

I agree that Boost.Spirit, Boost.Serialization and my library overlap to 
certain degrees.

>IOW, CSS would be unnecessary complication for Output Formatter at this
>stage. I like it this way:simple to understand and use. Formatting options
>are reasonably limited.

This is the direction I am currently taking. Possibly, at some point in the 
future, this library could become the output complement to Spirit (allowing 
advanced code generation), as well as Spirit simplifying the binding of data 
to the parser. But then again, I don't know how feasible that would be.

Regards,
Reece

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