At 17:22 06/08/99 , Alexander Staubo wrote:
The discussion could not have happened a month ago because nobody had spent any serious amount of time with the syntax. Time is not an issue here, or at least it shouldn't be. We're talking about a feature of Zope that, once established, we'll be living with for ever after.
Besides, migration problems isn't the issue. I don't see the difficulty. There's no particular reason why Zope shouldn't be able to apply the changes automatically, for example.
My contention is that the new syntax is significantly less readable and far too verbose. It's not really about keystrokes (the new syntax three characters shorter than the SSI syntax). The new syntax detracts from the idea of DTML as an expressive language -- why, if I had to prefix every word I spoke with the word "dtml", that wouldn't be so great. Because dtml-eventually dtml-you'd dtml-have dtml-to dtml-learn dtml-to dtml-filter dtml-out dtml-the dtml-dummy dtml-words. But in the world of natural languages, "dtml-if" isn't a word; it's two words; we learn, by convention, to split such hyphenated constructs into separate words. Our mind works best with individual words. Why go against the grain and teach the brain a new thing?
Afaik, there's no technical reason to prefer the "dtml-" prefix to something like "z-" or "dt". Is "dtml-in" somehow more unique in the world of markup languages than "dtin"? In the future when we're using XML namespaces, will we be writing "dtml:dtml-in"?
I'm not surprised that DC dominates the negatively-charged end of the discussion, but this is supposed to be an open-source development project, so I suggest a good, clean discussion on the topic and then a vote.
I have been using the new syntax for quite a while now. I have absolutely no problem in filtering out the dtml- prefix, just like I won't have any problems filtering out the z- prefix, or any other, _provided_ the prefix ends in a hyphen! It would be much harder to filter out the prefix without that clear delimiter. And no prefix would remove the possibility of defining our own dtml tags arbitrarily, like <dtml-html>, or to recognize custom dtml-tags in code not written by yourself. And believe me, I look at a lot of code written by others. I vote for a syntax where there is a prefix with a hyphen. Be it z- or dtml-, it doesn't matter that much to me in typing effort. -- Martijn Pieters, Web Developer | Antraciet http://www.antraciet.nl | Tel: +31-35-7502100 Fax: +31-35-7502111 | mailto:mj@antraciet.nl http://www.antraciet.nl/~mj | PGP: http://wwwkeys.nl.pgp.net:11371/pks/lookup?op=get&search=0xA8A32149 ------------------------------------------