Re: Survey of Surveys on HTML Templating systems

[fergal]

None of the surveys I've seen look at Petal which is based on Zope's TAL/ZPT. As far as I'm concerned there is no other way to do HTML/XML templates.

Example:

Welcome back <b tal:content="user/name">Sample Username</b>,
you last logged in <i tal:content="user/last_login">Sat 23rd Aug</i>

When you look at this in dreamweaver or a browser you'll see

Welcome back Sample Username, you last logged in Sat 23rd Aug

(view source on this page and you'll see that I have simply pasted in the code)

When you run this through the Petal engine you pass in a hash of data, say $h. Assuming

$h = {
  user => {
    name => "Fergal Daly"
    last_login => "Feb 22nd"
  }
}

The processed output will be

Welcome back Fergal Daly, you last logged in Feb 22nd

As you can see, the HTML beforehand is well formed, includes sample values for the dynamic parts and all you have to do with Dream weaver is apply styles to the sample data and all will be well. At template compile time, all the sample data is discarded and then at run time, the real data is inserted.

Of course TAL handles loops and conditionals etc. The thing that takes the most getting used to is that it's a little verbose. Unfortunately this is a necessary side effect of being truly compatible with XML/HTML.