Can I have any control over how ZPT formats the html it produces? Specifically, source like this:
Why do you care? A browser should not. If you want to read the output from time to time, and all else fails, use a pretty-printer like Tidy.
Grrrr. I *don't* really care, but it seems browsers and designers do. E.g. when the designers put a 1px 'spacer' image in a <td> (which btw winds me up), if TAL puts the td and img on different lines, IE formats the td as thought there is something in it.
And you seem to forget the NS 4.xx. Not widely used today but still! Until we get perfect browsers it is a good idea to have degree of control of how the HTML gets formatted.
More generally, the designers are getting annoyed that the formatting of their markup is not being preserved.
Well... It's not really the designer but the HTML coder that gets annoyed. Most of the times it is the same person... And let's face it, in the current status of affairs in browser world they have their reasons!
I wish I had the time and energy to convince people not to use dozens of tables filled with 1px images, but I don't.
Do you honestly think that html-coders/designers enjoy the "universal" 1px hack? Why convince the page designers? :-o Try the people that design the standards... And the rendering engines in browsers! Anyway, for various reasons we need some control over how we get the html formatted.