MVC Framework - Server-side DOM manipulation

Question

I'm building an MVC framework, and I'm looking for native solutions / frameworks / tag libraries to draw from or to replace my framework entirely.

I'm interested in the following features specifically:

• server-side DOM manipulation
• server-side events (page reload, form submit, node insertion, etc.)
• traversing the DOM tree using css selectors
• validation of html nodes nesting
• validation of html nodes allowed attributes
• support for tag libraries / user controls

Pretty much what you get with JavaScript, but on the server-side and with some little extras.

Any solution will do (even if partial), any language will do, any pointers are appreaciated (even from client-side languages, as long as it's possible to check the source code). Dealing with malformed html is not a prerequisite. Outputting valid markup is a big plus.

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Please offer practical solutions by pointing the language/framework that is being discussed and, if possible, what features it provides.

Answer 1

If you load your page into a DOM-parser you would be able to modify it from there. Then outputting it to the output buffer seems trivial.

But you would need to store the entire document in memory, which will inflict on the performance.

Answer 2

So, jQuery has a sort of selectors API implemented, I guess I can take a look at their source code. Also, PHP has support for XPath, this could help too.

Answer 3

have you checked out aptana jaxer?

Answer 4

Found a php html dom parser that also implements some html selectors here: http://simplehtmldom.sourceforge.net

Answer 5

Fizzler uses HTMLAgility pack and adds a server side queryselectorall to provide css selection: http://code.google.com/p/fizzler/