[Web-SIG] Bowing out (was Re: A trivial template API counter-proposal)

[Ian Bicking]

Phillip J. Eby wrote:
>>Despite some skepticism about the templating
>>effort, I certainly planned to evaluate it when it settled down.
> 
> 
> I'm not complaining about you personally tuning out; it's just that I ended 
> up being a sole advocate for stuff I thought Zope would need in order to 
> utilize the template standard as a basis for views, without being certain 
> of the details or whether you (i.e. zope.com and .org) actually cared (due 
> to you having disappeared after your initial comment).  (This of course 
> also goes for other view-based and "active page" frameworks that have 
> similar issues, but whose architects weren't around to comment in the first 
> place.)

Maybe the reason those voices are missing -- I now realize -- is that 
there aren't many "active page" frameworks left.  Spyce was, but since 
then I believe a more traditional controller-driven API has been added 
-- I don't know if the "active" part has been extracted from Spyce or 
not, but at least that portion is optional (and if you are embedding 
Spyce into another framework it is likely you won't want that part). 
Cheetah supports both models, but the active page model has long been 
discouraged.  Webware's PSP is unmaintained.  I suppose mod_python's PSP 
is similar as well, but I never got the impression anyone was 
championing that for anything.  Both Myghty and Django have 
active-page-like ways of working with them, but because they have both 
techniques available there's still a fairly solid conceptual separation 
of the framework/controller and the template language.

That's not to say active pages shouldn't be supported, but I think most 
of the people here see templates as generic content-builders as more 
fundamental than templates as web apps.  Active pages then are an 
application of templates, not to be confused with the template itself.


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