Standalone ZPT?

[Paul Boddie]

richie at entrian.com (Richie Hindle) wrote in message news:<8a6ba1da.0208210040.1159f31b at posting.google.com>...
> Gerhard,
> 
> > Are there any other Python templating systems that work like ZPT (i. e.
> > use attributes instead of custom tags)?
> 
> You could look at PyMeld, my very lightweight HTML manipulation module:

[...]

> PyMeld has no special requirements for the HTML, other than that each
> tag you want to manipulate must have an 'id' attribute, and the attribute
> values must be quoted.  It works by string substitution rather than by
> parsing and rebuilding the document, so it's immune to invalid or
> incomplete HTML, as long as the pieces you want to manipulate make sense.

I've also written a template system which uses 'id' attributes,
although it is extensible enough to permit other "structure
annotation" styles (see
http://www.python.org/cgi-bin/moinmoin/StructureAnnotation for an
explanation of that jargon). Unlike PyMeld, it uses the various XML
libraries and deserves to be a bit faster - I'm going to see what
cDomlette can bring to the table in that respect, although a previous
iteration of this work did use some "proxy" classes to wrap XML
documents in a more abstract API, and that was even slower. :-)

Another thing which distinguishes it from PyMeld is that the
"instantiation" process involves a single call and requires the data
used in the final output to originate from an XML document (which
should have been loaded into a DOM tree, of course). If XML-centric
projects aren't your thing, then I can imagine that this might cause
your interest to be discontinued almost immediately, although I'm sure
a refactoring could permit other structure types to be employed
directly; indirectly, one can already convert dictionaries to XML
documents on the basis of a naming convention used in the keys
employed in such dictionaries - this can be helpful in the processing
on incoming Web form data, for example.

I haven't released this work yet, partly because there are so many
things I want to do with the template parts, and partly because I
became ambitious and introduced some kind of relational database
serialisation for the XML which uses user-defined table descriptions,
but I'm sure that at some point, I'll tidy it up and make some kind of
release.

Paul