[AWS] can HTML field type TEXT be used for interactive use ?

[Thomas Løcke]

On Wed, Apr 20, 2011 at 7:40 AM, brett hallett <dragoncity at aanet.com.au> wrote:
> Hello,
> I'm using Ada-AWS for some simple data entry tasks and in a effort
> to reduce the amount of 'overhead' coding and have written a AWS Code
> Generator which automatically converts a KompoZer HTML file into a
> complete AdaCore-GPS project ( .adb, .gpr, etc ) which are generated
> with little input from the developer ( me) who then adds local logic
> code as necessary. Its quite a rapid way to get a working AWS program.
>
> However I find that </textarea is the only field type that seems to
> offer true interactive usability. ie: will both allow input and
> updating. TEXT appears to allow only inputting.
>
> Is this a limitation of HTML or AWS ?
>
> The attached example program gets two values from a TEXT field , but
> has to display the results in a TEXTAREA field, and it also appears
> that its difficult to control its displayed field size and
> value alignment and is somewhat 'chunky'. ( A HTML problem I guess)


Hey Brett,

I'm not quite sure I understand your issue completely, but it does not
sound like a problem related to AWS.

AWS is an Ada implementation of the HTTP/1.1 protocol as defined in
the RFC 2616. The fact that you can use AWS to transfer HTML really
doesn't mean that AWS has anything to do with whatever HTML problems
you might have, unless of course you're using web blocks and Ajax as
per http://www.adacore.com/wp-content/files/auto_update/aws-docs/aws.html#Web-Block-and-Ajax
- this is to  my knowledge the only place where AWS enters the world
of HTML, but since you don't specifically mention this, I suspect
you're not using web blocks?

Also I wonder why you aren't using Templates_Parser for your output?
It's a perfect match for AWS. And what exactly is happening in
calcarea2_cb.AWS_CB?

Use CSS to prettify your HTML. There are plenty of tutorials.
Actually, if you're in a controlled environment (ie. you control the
browsers used), then I'd take a good long look at HTML5. You can
create some very nice interfaces when combining HTML5/CSS/Javascript.

Regards,
Thomas Løcke