[Web-SIG] Re: Just lost another one to Rails

[Ian Bicking]

Ryan Tomayko wrote:
> We're experiencing this problem with Kid, which is framework neutral. 
> I'm finding that the amount of glue code needed for most frameworks is 
> more than I expected.
> 
> The other issue I'm having with is that it's really hard to provide 
> anything but really simple template examples and other documentation 
> without assuming a certain framework. I can show the basic layout 
> control and substitution features but it's hard to show real world 
> examples of, say, how a basic site should be laid out.

In a way, I think this is up to the framework -- frameworks tend to have 
opinions or policy on how files and code is layed out.  Templates have 
opinions on how site look is separate from the layout of individual 
pages, and stuff like that.

Ideally, for a significant class of frameworks it would be nice if they 
could all be interfaced in the same way.  I.e., you pass in a namespace, 
and maybe a "template space" as well, when templates look up up other 
templates (as with ZPT macros, standard headers/footers in other other 
languages, etc).  There's small but subtle differences between 
templates, but maybe those could be papered over.

Then docs would be two-fold -- the framework would describe how it loads 
and populates templates (generically) and templates would describe what 
they do with the values given to them.

-- 
Ian Bicking  /  ianb at colorstudy.com  /  http://blog.ianbicking.org