[Web-SIG] Standardized template API

[Phillip J. Eby]

[back to the Web-SIG]

At 09:39 PM 1/31/2006 -0600, Ian Bicking wrote:
>How do you pass in variables?

environ, or a nested variable therein


>   How do you get non-string output?

What kind of non-string output?  For doing what?


 >But there's a kind of templating that occurs in a typical application
 >that is much more intimately tied to the calling code, and shouldn't be
 >pushed through an HTTP-like interface.

But that HTTP-like interface can be concealed in a library wrapper for 
systems that don't orient that way, and if you *don't* supply such an 
interface, then template systems that orient that way are put at a 
disadvantage that *can't* be worked around by library wrapping.

Granted, using WSGI means that frameworks with deeper WSGI integration are 
rewarded by this approach (because they can just expose their existing WSGI 
context to the template), but that doesn't seem like a *bad* thing to me.  :)

(By the way, there are a few WSGI features that could be dropped for the 
resource interface in any case, lessening the overhead of those frameworks 
that have to recreate a WSGI context.  We could remove the requirements for 
the caller to supply a write() function, for example, along with the 
wsgi.input and wsgi.errors streams, which have negligible utility for 
templates.)