Open Source Web Development with LAMP: Using Linux, Apache, MySQL, Perl, and PHP

11.7. Mason Components

Mason allows construction of complex web sites through the notion of components. A Mason component is a file with any combination of HTML, Perl, and Mason code.

For a simple example, we will create a header file and footer file that will be applied across the web site.

First, we’ll create some header HTML and put it in the file /var/www/html/mason/_header. The following HTML is the beginning HTML for the example:

<html> 
<head> 
<title>Mason Component Example</title> 
</head> 
<body bgcolor="#ffffff"> 
<i>This text is in the header.</i> 
<hr> 

Don’t panic ^[3]—this is just basic HTML. No new stuff here. This illustrates that a Mason component need not contain any Mason at all—plain HTML is fine. This HTML is then included when ...