Shane Hathaway writes:

lalo@hackandroll.org wrote:

...

The only thing I _don't_ feel good about this kind of template is that, in practice, we will probably lose the benefits of things like <dtml-var standard_html_header> - meaning, when you want to change the header of your site, you'll have to edit all your templates.

I agree this is a problem, and speaking from experience, changing all templates is not an acceptable compromise. For www.zope.org that would mean including the standard template in nearly every page, everywhere, because the pages on www.zope.org are nearly all "templates" themselves. We would lose one of the primary benefits of Zope.

Another unacceptable compromise is including a variant of standard_html_header and _footer on every page (as is done now). One reason is because it is not possible to write standard_html_header/_footer using well-formed XML. The header begins the "html" tag, while the footer ends it. In fact, most sites these days put the beginning of a table in _header and the end of the table in _footer. Objects containing non-well-formed XML aren't compatible with a DOM-based solution.

This has been one of the points of discussion here at DC. The only reasonable solution we've come up with is automatically wrapping the results of the rendering in an acquired object with a fixed name such as standard_page_template.

The other solution that I have tried to wrestle with is introducing some kind of multiple view system with automatic selection of the default view. But in reality, the standard_page_template solution would make the multiple view system possible as well.

So what does everyone think? Is standard_page_template the right thing to do? Is there a better way? Help! I did not (yet) look at HiperDOM and xmlc. Nor am I familiar with dreamweaver and friends. Thus, maybe, I should not speak up.

If one is really interested in a separation of content and presentation (which I feel is good), then the "standard_html_*" were wrong in the first place. It forces the content author to prepare for presentation. The "page_template" proposal is much better in this respect, as it is external to the content. Of cause, there should be a way to select between different page templates and not be bound to a fixed template (already mentioned by a previous responder). The other question deals with template modularity. If a single modification should influence several templates, then this is best addressed by building the templates out of modules. The modification of a module then affects all templates that use it. Modularization would be possible if e.g. XSLT is used for presentation. I do not know, whether Dreamweaver has a modularization concept. I hope so. The current "header/footer" fragments are not optimal wrt. modularization, as tightly coupled stuff ("footer" must close everything that "header" opened) is separated into different objects. It is much better to have a module that contains both the page prolog and epilog and a placeholder for the actual content, maybe filled in with sample text that later is replaced by the content, i.e. a page template. It is good that you are forced to use well formed XML in your modules. Dieter