sam.benskin.co.uk - am i missing something?

In my continuing search for a fantastic user interface mark-up language, i have previously looked at Bindows and Backbase, each with their benefits and drawbacks, but could it be that a simple slice of CakePHP is what i'm hungry for?

Ok enough of the clever use of the English language. But being serious for a moment, CakePHP seems to offer not only a fantastic framework for PHP, based upon the highly popular Ruby on Rails Framework, but also seems to have the ability to process custom mark-up tags.

One of the lesser known features of CakePHP is the ability to process custom HTML tags.

What does this mean for the end user, i hear you cry? Well, as Miguel Ros demonstrates in his fantastic example, Custom HTML Tags, it seems to be very possible to write your very own markup, and have CakePHP transform it into valid HTML. This would allow someone to create a library of custom tags, that could be changed into HTML that has specific styles and layouts already associated with it. For example, a custom div with four containing divs could be transformed into a Tab Pane layout, with two divs being tabs, and two being the content in those tabs, with the main div controling the size and postion and so on.

I've seen this before, but this particular implementation seems rather special, as not only do you write the custom html markup, but you are also directly in control of what that markup is transformed into.

Perhaps instead of searching for a user interface design system that doesn't tick all my boxes, maybe i should create one myself.