Friday, September 2, 2011

Simple HTML-Building Utilities

It is a bit cumbersome to generate HTML with println statements. The real solution is to use Java Server Pages (JSP), which is discussed later in this tutorial. However, for standard servlets, there are two parts of the Web page (DOCTYPE and HEAD) that are unlikely to change and thus could benefit from being incorporated into a simple utility file.
The DOCTYPE line is technically required by the HTML spec, and although most major browsers ignore it, it is very useful when sending pages to formal HTML validators. These validators compare the HTML syntax of pages against the formal HTML specification, and use the DOCTYPE line to determine which version of HTML to check against. Their use is very highly recommended both for static HTML pages and for pages generated via servlets, so the use of DOCTYPE is well worth the effort, especially if it can be easily incorporated into a servlet utilities class.
In many Web pages, the HEAD line contains nothing but the TITLE, although advanced developers may want to include META tags and style sheets. But for the simple case, I'll create a method that takes a title as input and returns the DOCTYPE, HEAD, and TITLE entries as output. Here's the code: 

ServletUtilities.java

package hall;

public class ServletUtilities {
  public static final String DOCTYPE =
    "<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC \"-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN\">";

  public static String headWithTitle(String title) {
    return(DOCTYPE + "\n" +
           "<HTML>\n" +
           "<HEAD><TITLE>" + title + "</TITLE></HEAD>\n");
  }
  
  // Other utilities will be shown later...
}

 


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