Future wish: Dryml should help developers to understand how HTML is generated in development mode
iox opened this issue · comments
See this discussion: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/hobousers/RAjThOCvxTg
Kevin wanted to changed the "(No available)" message in his table plus, but it took him a lot of effort to discover where that text was generated. We should make it easier for users!
One idea that has been around my mind for some time is to take https://github.com/ddnexus/dryml-firemarker and build it into Hobo development mode. It could be a button like the current "user switcher" or just some HTML comments/data-attributes to be inspected with browser developer tools like Firebug.
This way the developer would have an easy way to inspect the complete tree of tags being used in a particular field very fast.
We could also provide hints to common operations like:
- Replace this piece of HTML
- Append/Prepend to this piece of HTML
- Rewrite this select-one to use a custom label
I would absolutely love to have visibility into how the tags work together.
The biggest issue making the learning curve of Hobo (specifically, the Rapid library) steep for me is that I do not have visibility into which tags are calling each other internally.
I think I am not the only one.
Whether this info is displayed in the browser, or just spit out into the development server log is secondary to me, whatever is easier to develop. Also, I am not sure a browser-specific development tool would facilitate adoption as much as a lesser featured but browser-agnostic one, or one that gracefully degrades on non-supported browsers (or can be configured server-side).