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I’ve just planned the order I’m going to add features to the DVD Profiler Companion, and updated the web page to match. Details here.

Perhaps the most fundamental thing to HTML is the fact that an element is created by inserting a tag name, surrounded with < and > e.g. <elementname>. Because of this, any time you want an actual < or > to appear in the text (e.g. 2 < 4), it must be ‘escaped’ as &lt; or &gt;.

Any element content (which may include more HTML) goes after the opening tag, and is then followed by a closing tag </tag> e.g. <b>This text is bold</tag>

A tag may also have parameters passed to it via attributes e.g. <element parameter="value">

Code like that found in a typical DVD Profiler skin
<DP NAME="SOMETHING" ATTRIBUTE="<b>Some HTML embedded within the actual tag as an attribute value....</b>"> breaks all the rules on what constitutes HTML, and is thus a complete nightmare to handle.

How do you tell (algorithmically) where the <DP> element ends in this example? It’s a lot harder than just looking for the first > after <DP…

Even the source colouriser inside DVD Profiler gets confused with stuff like that, and that example came straight out of an IVS-created skin!

<td align="right" WIDTH="0"><DP NAME="LOCK_RELEASEDATE" IFSET="<IMG SRC='$DPIMAGES.Locked.gif'>"></td></TR></TABLE></TD>


I finally started work on this a week ago (Christmas Eve), and am making fairly rapid progress. Milestones to date:

24 Dec: Started Work
26 Dec: Finished mapping major relationships between DVD Profiler skin HTML and DVD Profiler’s generated HTML for display. 1900 lines of code were needed to do this.
27 Dec: Documented work, and perfomed further investigation into some corner cases.
29 Dec: Factored out some shared code – now ‘only’ 1500 lines.
31 Dec: First successful generation of complete standalone HTML file.