Feature Proposal: Make Foswiki::Render pluggable

Motivation

Foswiki::Render is a major weakness of Foswiki. Let's make it pluggable, so we can explore deep changes or even replacement in a robust way without disrupting our wider userbase.

The following bugs in particular are quite painful and would benefit from more adventurous explorations of Foswiki::Render:

• Item11316 Foswiki::Render inappropriately (ab)uses empty <p> tags
• Item11366 Ampersands in [[squab?queries]] are double-encoded
• Item9771 putting a foswiki table into a list can produce broken html
• Item12061 ICON macro should produce single quotes

Description and Documentation

There are these main ways to get TML rendered, AFAICS:

• Foswiki::Func::renderText( $text, $web, $topic ) -> $html - official API
• Foswiki::Meta->renderTML($tml) -> $html - Semi-official API
• Foswiki::Render::getRenderedVersion($tml, $topicObject) -> $html - legacy; many plugins in svn
• $session->renderer()->getRenderedVersion($tml, $topicObject) -> $html - core, tests & some plugins

Need to make all these forms wrappers to a thing which determines the correct renderer class for the job.

Examples

Impact

• Performance
• Must support an eventual FoswikiDOM renderer
• Should allow different renderers to be used for different content-types (actual content negotiation is outside the scope of this proposal, except that this work should support an a future content-negotiation mechanism).

Implementation

-- Contributors: PaulHarvey - 01 Feb 2012

Discussion