Just wondering, HTML to MXML conversion?

[CDHBookingEdge]

I was wondering if anyone has done any work on a program to convert HTML to MXML. Here's my thought process, possibly a bit weak LOL. Now a client may have a site that has already been developed or at least prototyped in HTML. Now, admittedly the same UI concepts won't be used quite probably but the "original site" does give a starting point to work off of. So a program such as that could b a part of a set of code generation tools.

Thanks in advance,
Christopher

[senocular]

I was thinking about something like that too. But there's a lot that won't carry over between the two formats... but I guess just doing what you can is good enough.

And a lot of it is not just getting from one format to the other but HTML usually uses a lot more nesting for its layouts - a lot more block elements to control where things go, something MXML hardly uses at all. And such a conversion would require css parsing as well to get that layout... though, again, I guess if you just need content and not formatting it wouldn't matter...

... either way, I'm not doing it ;)

[jsebrech]

I'm not up to scratch on MXML, but for HTML, if the site design uses CSS to influence the layout, you'll need to take the entirety of the CSS specification into account. Things might get too complicated.

[CDHBookingEdge]

Ok so sounds like the concensus seems to be "nice idea but it would be a bi*** to really do, and ROI is probably not worth the investment" eh?

Darn, cuz I can foresee where some of our clients (maybe a lot of them) will be needing to have sites converted over. So I'm gonna need to get us a set of tools built. Oh well back to the drawing board or maybe LOL just back to bed!

Thanks guys,
Christopher

[senocular]

I guess it depends on your needs. And there might be other approaches... for example, instead of parsing and interpreting the HTML/CSS yourself, you could probably just use something like Firefox... in fact the tool itself could just be a firefox extension. That will give you complete access to the document dom and all the goodness that comes with (i.e. Mozilla rendering).