[Web-SIG] Terminology and a question

[Phillip J. Eby]

Okay, so now it's clear to me that some of the crosstalk on my proposal was 
due to terminology issues.  I'd like to propose a revised terminology for 
discussing the various attempts at a templating standard, specifically:

publisher - the part of a system that determines what template is to be 
used, usually in the form of an ID, path, or other symbolic name of a template

manager - the part of a system that manages the conversion from a template 
identifier to something executable, by finding the source code and 
compiling it.  (or retrieving it from a cache, etc.)

compiler - the part of a system that knows how to convert the source of a 
template into something executable

resource - the "something executable" created by the compiler and returned 
or cached by the manager, for use by the publisher.

Does this make sense to everybody?  I think this will help us figure out 
what will and won't work for systems that put different things on different 
sides of the "framework/template" line, since it seems there are some 
template systems that include a "manager" and some that do not, and there 
are some frameworks that include a "manager" and some that do not.

My proposal was based on an assumption that framework usually means a 
publisher+manager, and a template engine means a compiler+resources.  I'm 
not sure if it is as useful when the template engine means a 
manager+compiler+resources, but think we should explore that a bit 
more.  It may also be that there are useful opportunities to standardize or 
library-ize other parts of this stack than have been discussed so far.