[Web-SIG] htmlgen

[Greg Stein]

On Thu, Oct 30, 2003 at 10:44:52AM -0600, Ian Bicking wrote:
> On Thursday, October 30, 2003, at 10:33 AM, Gregory (Grisha) Trubetskoy 
> wrote:
> > HTMLgen has a DocumentTemplate thing which is a bare bones templating
> > system allowing for substitution in a text file. I think something
> > primitive of this sort and perhaps implemented based on this:
> >
> > http://aspn.activestate.com/ASPN/Cookbook/Python/Recipe/81330
> >
> > (which can probably be even further optimized)
> >
> > would be nice to have in stdlib.
> 
> A templating system in its most naive form is just a kind of string 
> substitution.  If that's the kind of thing we're looking for, then 
> perhaps -- but it has to be usefully better than %.  (Though % would be

Right. Simple interpolation is rarely enough. The features that I found to
be useful in a templating system:

* interpolation
* conditionals
* iteration
* structured objects  (i.e. something like: foo.bar)
* including sub-templates

I've also found that *restricting* the functionality to just this limited
set helps to provide clarity and avoid complex abuses of templates. I look
at the task simply as "rendering data" and prefer a simple syntax and
functionality to match that.

Cheers,
-g

p.s. yah yah, this is an implicit pimping of my ezt module :-)
   http://svn.webdav.org/repos/projects/ezt/trunk/ezt.py

-- 
Greg Stein, http://www.lyra.org/