On Wednesday 08 May 2002 08:54 am, Adrian Hungate allegedly wrote:
Vi/Emacs war anyone? :)
Seriously though, what, exactly, was so broken about DTML that fixing it became so vital?
It was mostly motivated by the desire to be able to edit dynamic templates with WYSIWIG tools (like dreamweaver), something that is not possible with DTML. Also it was an implementation of the desire to acheive greater separation of presentation and logic. Something not encouraged by DTML. Another reason was the desire to increase the explicitness of the language. IOW, make it less magical, less unpredictable. DTML also encourages a mixing of content with logic (ala DTML Document), something ZPT does not. Although I am befuddled by the whole ZPTPage thing in Zope 3....Hmmm, maybe I'm wrong here 8^/
Given the strengths of DTML I still maintain that ZPT is no (yet?) a complete replacement, and given the comfortable, familiar syntax, I doubt that it should ever replace DTML completely, even if most pages are ZPT. I would be very supprised (Not to mention impressed) if by 2.6 ZPT can comfortably replace every aspect of DTML without having to employ Python scripts, or some arcane incantations.
ZPT is not a complete replacement for DTML. It is just another way to do templating. By design, it is less powerful than DTML. It is better suited to templating most SGML documents tho IMHO, which are often in the majority in Zope apps. That said, ZPT sux for templating plain text documents.
Don't get me wrong, ZPT is likely to be a very useful supliment to the existing Zope tools, but I would no more suggest replacing Python Scripts, than DTML.
DTML is not going anywhere. Its just not the only game in town anymore. -Casey