Degradable Gists (update)

The good people at GitHub have implemented a JSONP api for Gists, so I have updated my graceful degarding script accordingly (see previous post).

Now the code no longer needs to hijack document.write and has better load time characteristics as well. If you use traditional <script> tags then each gist will block the loading of the page at that point, causing jittery page renderings, and preventing the rest of the content from appearing. This script styles the <pre> tags when the DOM becomes ready, and only fetches the syntax highlighted HTML after the onload event, when all other page elements have finished loading.

The second new bit is the Perl scripts I've added to streamline working with these degradable Gists.

The first script is very simple, given a Gist ID it prints out a <pre> tag suitable for inclusion into your HTML document. For instance make_pre_tag.pl 115368 outputs:

<pre id="fake-gist-115368" class="fake-gist">use Moose;
has fun =&gt; ( isa =&gt; &quot;Constant&quot; );</pre>

The second script, update_gists.pl is much more interesting. It uses XML::LibXML to find all the pre tags with the class fake-gist in a document. If these tags have no ID then App::Nopaste is used to create new Gists. Otherwise AnyEvent::HTTP is used to concurrently fetch the updated versions from http://gist.github.com/.

I start by editing a plain XHTML document in my editor, adding code in the <pre> tags, and then I post the code blocks to github all at once. I use CDATA sections to escape the source code in the XHTML document.

<pre lang="perl" class="fake-gist"><![CDATA[
$object->method(
    foo => $bar, 
);
]]></pre>

The script re-escapes that using HTML entities so that it is valid HTML (which doesn't support CDATA). This way the <pre> tags render fine under quirks mode, allowing jQuery to append HTML strings to the document.