I want to share with you a quick XHP class you can build that will greatly abstract your image spriting. Image sprites are a great way to reduce the number of resources downloaded from your server, but they can be a hassle to maintain. If you already sprite your images then you might have a class that generates the styles for your images. Your API might look something like this:

ImageSprite::getSpriteHtml(ImageSprite::ICON_PHOTOS);

You can sprinkle those into your rendering and it’ll work just fine, but with XHP you can build a custom component that behaves more like an HTML img tag than a PHP class and generates your spriting code behind the scenes.

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XHP was built for Unix, and thus can run just fine on a Mac, but sometimes for whatever reason, XHP has a little trouble. Here are the steps to installation that seem to work if you’re getting unknown errors.

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XHP runs validation checks on all attribute sets and gets, but in the emerging world of HTML5, data attributes are validation-less. With a little bit of tweaking, you can add HTML5 data attribute support to all HTML elements in XHP. In the same swing, you can add WAI-ARIA support for your accessibility users. In this post we’ll dig into the php source of XHP and do a little optimizations of our own.

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A good site design uses a consistent palette and reusable styles, but the unavoidable pitfall is the developer will have to remember every classname for every color and format, or redeclare the same values for multiple CSS classes. There are many frameworks and scripts that try to simulate CSS variables to help with this problem, but they actually make the situation worse. You’ll still have to remember all the variables and you’ll also have to put them in multiple CSS classes. XHP provides a new (and perhaps the first real) solution to this problem. By creating a simple element that holds your common formatting and styles, you can both avoid having to remember all the CSS class names as well as stop duplicating the same style in multiple CSS classes.

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On the surface XHP is nothing more than eye candy, but used correctly it can greatly simplify development. Creating good abstractions has always been smart programming, but it’s very difficult to do that for your HTML components without mucking up your rendering code. Enter XHP to the rescue. Here I’ll show you some basic examples of how XHP can be used to abstract out your rendering logic. These will be pretty basic, but hopefully enough to give you some ideas for your own setups.

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There seems to be very little on the web still about XHP. It’s an incredibly powerful tool that I think remains unused mostly because of its lack of documentation. Hopefully this will help get the ball rolling, so to speak, with adoption of XHP as the eventual defacto standard in PHP web programming, as is my opinion it should be.

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