On Tue, May 07, 2002 at 05:35:55PM -0400, Shane Hathaway wrote:
Adrian Hungate wrote:
Ok, ZPT is easier that DTML? How do you code this in ZPT?
<dtml-in objectIds() sort=id> <dtml-var sequence-item> </dtml-in>
You have some good points, but there's a certain irony in the fact that the above code won't work. You either forgot to quote the "objectIds()" expression, or it shouldn't have parentheses, illustrating the first ugly thing most people run into when learning DTML. :-)
Nevertheless, as you said, ZPT really does need some better way to implement batching and sorting. The need is too common to require external scripts or big Python expressions to do it.
Shane
I agree with the irony and all that, and have tried several times to switch to zpt. I am finally almost there. But, I also agree with Adrian's thrust, DTML is a simple useful language, that, ignoring the quoting problems and all the _ namespace magic, can be picked up by anyone with an imperative language background in a couple of days. (Now, the quoting problems are indeed gross). There is also far too much magic in DTML, especially in name lookup. ZPT is, in fact, a much more controllable artifact. It is also ugly, and almost completely non-intuitive. It seems far harder to map to conventional languages. In fact, I am wondering if ZPT code may not prove to be harder to maintain, mostly because I have real trouble finding the tal: statements while scanning the program. In particular, tal:repeat seems nowhere near as easy to find as <dtml-in>. I suspect that a great deal of my problem is that ZPT is an infix or a suffix-like notation, where DTML was a prefix notation. I am used to skipping infixes to some extent, especially on first reading. I am going to be honest, I think I could probably do no better, given the constraints of embedding in XML. The biggest change for the better that I see is that it is now easy to use a script (Python) [still lobbying for Snake Thingie] as index_html. Jim Penny
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