Manual

API to create HTML Pages

Creation

Creation – Making a new page

Description

A HTML page is created by instantiating a new HTML_Page2 object. While you may pass an array of attributes to the constructor, it isn't required since the default settings are fairly intuitive.

Unix line endings (\n)
UTF-8 charset
text/html MIME type
XHTML 1.0 Transitional doctype
English language

If you don't like these settings, you can either pass an array of settings to the constructor or use setter methods such as setDoctype(), setMimeEncoding() or setCharset() .

Creating a HTML page

<?php
require_once 'HTML/Page2.php';
$page = new HTML_Page2();
$page->setTitle('My first HTML page');
$page->addBodyContent('<h1>Hello!</h1>');
$page->display();
?>

Headers

Headers – Setting title and other meta data

Setting headers

The method you surely will use is setTitle() that sets the title of the page; the one that your browser displays in its title/window bar.

<?php
$page->setTitle('My first HTML page');
?>

Meta tags can be set with setMetaData() which takes two parameters, the tag name and the content.

<?php
$page->setMetaData('author', 'Christian Weiske');
?>

A link to a bookmark icon (favicon) can be set using addFavicon() .

Links to related pages (previous, next, home etc.) are added with addHeadLink() - the first parameter determines the URL, the second the relation.

<?php
$page->addHeadLink('home.htm', 'Start');
?>

Adding CSS - Cascading stylesheets

A HTML page may contain two types of stylesheets: Inline css and a link to external .css file.

Inline CSS declarations are made with addStyleDeclaration()

<?php
$page->addStyleDeclaration('
div.block {
    border: 1px solid #000;
}
');
?>

Links to external CSS files are created by using addStyleSheet(). The optional third parameter determines which media type the stylesheet shall be used for.

<?php
$page->addStyleSheet('css/dark.css');
$page->addStyleSheet('css/print.css', 'text/css', 'print');
?>

Adding scripts

You may want to add some javascript code to your page; either inline or link to an external .js file.

Inline code blocks are added with addScriptDeclaration() . The optional second parameter defaults to text/javascript but can be changed as needed.

<?php
$page->addScriptDeclaration('
function javaScriptTest() {
    alert("Test");
}
');
?>

Links to external script files are created by using addScript().

<?php
$page->addScript('js/functions.js');
?>

Body

Body – Adding content

Description

After creating the page and setting headers, you want to add actual content to the page. The method in charge is addBodyContent().

By default, if content already exists, the new content is appended. If you wish to overwrite whatever is in the body, use setBody(); unsetBody() completely empties the body without inserting new content. You can also use prependBodyContent() to prepend content to whatever is currently in the array of body elements.

The following constants are defined to be passed as the flag attribute: HTML_PAGE2_APPEND, HTML_PAGE2_PREPEND and HTML_PAGE2_REPLACE. Their usage should be quite clear from their names.

<?php
$page->addBodyContent('<h1>Hello!</h1>');
$page->addBodyContent('<p>This is a paragraph.</p>');
?>

Output

Output – Finishing the page

Description

After adding all the headers and content to the page, you want to get the page to the user. display() directly echoes the page to the browser.

If you want to do something with the result page before pushing it to the browser, use toHtml() . It returns the page as string that can be modified further.

<?php
//push it to the browser
$page->display();
//or put it into a variable
$html = $page->toHtml();
?>