Hi, Jim Fulton wrote:
Robb Shecter wrote:
Hi,
I think I saw somewhere that a new / alternate syntax for Zope/DHTML is being thought about or worked on.
I'm not sure what you are refering to.
I don't either. :) I had seen some metnion of something, somewhere.
This article compares JSP to a competing template language that does things (IMO) much better:
http://www.servlets.com/soapbox/problems-jsp.html
...For me, the syntax of DHTML is the most difficult aspect of Zope, and is reminiscent of JSP.
Let me qualify that: I don't mean to slam on the DHTML syntax. I just wanted to point out a current discussion going on in the Java world. What I meant by difficult is: I'm not too adept at DTML yet, and one thing that throws me is that there are apparently different "levels" of coding; some statement/commands have their own tags. Some are attributes of a tag. Some are written inside a string as the value of an attribute. And, I find the XML tag endings and dtml markers distracting.
That's interesting.
Good.
From a purely syntactic point of view, this paper, favors a perl-style syntax rather than an HTML-style syntax and argue that page designers would find the perl-style syntax easier to understand. For example, the paper argues that:
#foreach $isp in $isps { The next name is $isp.Name <br> }
is more understandable by web-page designers than:
<foreach item="isp" list="isps"> The next name is <jsp:getProperty name="isp" property="name"/> <br> </foreach>
I find this hard to swallow. Web-page designer's tools will certainly have less trouble with the latter format than with the former.
Hmm - the second one looks like a horror to me. But then, I'm not a web page designer. Also, Webmacro's syntax was chosen to be deliberately non-xml-like, so that it *would* work well with html tools. It avoids the problems of programs choking on, or not displaying unknown tags. The Java servlet list occasionally has messages like "Looking for JSP-aware editors"... AFAIK, that isn't a problem with webmacro.
I certainly prefer:
<dtml-in isps> The next name is <dtml-var sequence-item><br> </dtml-in>
to either of the above.
How about something like: #in $isps { The next name is $item <br> } Somehow this version is easier on the eyes for me - like I can more easily pick out the dynamic bits. I guess the real issue is whether xml syntax is a good thing. I guess there's reasons both for and against it. I do my scripting by hand, usually, so the extra characters required for xml-like seeem to get in the way.
Leaving out syntactical details, I think the paper makes some interesting points having to do with the basic approach of JSP (and ASP). JSP and ASP are fundamentally, though subtley, different from "template languages", like DTML and the languages discussed in the paper.
Yes - true. The paper helps categorize things a bit. - Robb