macros in reports [Was: Re: Update Annoyances]

[Kevin Spicer]

On Fri, 2003-10-17 at 17:59, David Lee wrote:

>The idea of that thought-exercise is that the files is that the file
>contents would simply macro references, general enough so that for most
>sites, most files could remain as defaults (no maintenance), and that
>the
>macro definitions could be concentrated in one place (localised manual
>intervention, possibly assisted by "patch"/"diff" etc.).

>A related aspect is that it allows the content (macro definitions, via
>a
>central config) and the presentation (macro references, via files
>(would
>they continue to be files?)) to have a decent separation.

Sounds like we were thinking along the same lines!  FWIW I think the
macro definitions should be in a seperate file in the directory for each
language, but probably not in languages.conf  (maybe macros.conf ?)
Keeping the macros responsible for relatively small re-usable parts of
the message text would mean that it would probably not be necessary to
use differnt macros for the text and html reports.  Although (maybe,
depending on the level of work involved) html tags could be permitted in
macro definitions, but stripped (simple regex like s/<.*>//g) for text
reports so that one could use <B><I><U> etc.




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