Toby Dickenson wrote:
On Tue, 27 Feb 2001 09:56:17 +1100, Itai Tavor <itai@optusnet.com.au> wrote:
citing some irrelevant concern about polluting the namespace.
namespace pollution is less serious if you have a greater number of namespaces, and more serious if you have fewer.
dtml is the only language I know which only provides *one* namespace.
Ok, so namespace pollution might be a valid argument against the prefix patch. But as Chris and Tino pointed out, it's irrelevant for sequence_xxx - and that's the patch that has been repeatedly requested on the list and rejected by DC. Chris Withers wrote:
Sorry to jump in here, but can we please not let this argument rob us of yet another chance to get a nice alternative to such abominations as: <dtml-var "_['sequence-item']*3">
<dtml-var "sequence_item 3"> is much nicer :-)
Tino, is there any chance you could split your dtml-in patch into two so that the contraversial bit can be argued over while not impeding the most useful bit?
please?!
Chris
Hey, that's just what I wanted to say! I vote that that sequence_xxx aliases be added to Zope 2.3.1, while discussions on the prefix patch can continue. I personally don't care about this one - I never met the need for it. But I use sequence_xxx names in preference to _['sequence_xxx'] all the time, and I've seen no good argument against adding it to the core. But then, votes only count in a democracy. Toby Dickenson wrote:
IMO the *real* answer is to not implement logic in dtml. The problems (and the need for this patch) go away.
People keep telling us DTML coders this. I would really like to see some of your code, because I just don't get it. Formatting HTML is a whole lot easier in DTML than in python. A DTML document looks mostly just like the HTML it generates, plus some DTML tags. It's easy to read and it's easy for non-programmers to modify. HTML in python is a long ugly list of print statements or a bunch of messy variable substitutions on string constants. I just can't see what can possibly be simpler than a dtml-in loop. dtml-in might be used for logic, and that would be a bad idea. But it's also used a whole lot for display formatting - and for that it's the best tool around. People keep talking about phasing DTML out. But if the alternative is formatting HTML in python, I'm outta here. Itai -- -- Itai Tavor -- "Je sautille, donc je suis." -- itai@optusnet.com.au -- - Kermit the Frog -- -- -- -- "If you haven't got your health, you haven't got anything" --