Am I the only one who does not take particularly kindly to the new DTML syntax? Well, I guess I might be. :) Before you bring forth the lynching implements, though, hear me out. In my opinion the number one problem is that the word "dtml" detracts from readability (as does the fact that the new syntax is visually less distinguishable from HTML or XML, but I guess that as we're dealing with SGML-like markup languages we can't really avoid that). When I think "if", I want to type "if", not "dtml-if", and consequently I typically end up writing "if", backtracking a bit, typing "dtml-" and then going on from there. That's just me, I guess. But the point is, the inclusion of "dtml-" spins my mind through too many connotations. If I had to type "html-" before every HTML tag, the same thing would happen. It would be a pain. Since control characters (<, >, :, # and so forth) do not carry the baggage of mental associations, they are more efficient, and that's why the old "<!--#" sequence still comes easier to my mind than the new syntax. Another, possibly more powerful argument is that the new syntax is essentially backwards: The actually "command" or "directive" doesn't start until 7 characters into the tag ("<dtml-"). To match one dtml-if against its closing tag, the mind must visually match a whole 7 characters ("dtml-if"), which is awkward. More than that, psychologically a sequence of characters such as "dtml-if" is much less efficient for pattern matching than just the sequence "if", especially if we consider the multitude of DTML keywords: They all share the common prefix "dtml-", making them variations of a spelling rather than separate, mind-sortable entities. The fact that the closing tag slash -- as in "</dtml-if>" precedes the "dtml" part actually _forces_ your brain to process the whole string, as opposed to just honing in on the "if" part. I don't know about you, but my mind sifts through a list such as if in var else unless sqltest call must faster than dtml-if dtml-in dtml-var dtml-else dtml-unless dtml-sqltest dtml-call Imho, Cold Fusion's CFML syntax does one notch better than DTML because it only devotes two characters ("CF") to distinguishing Cold Fusion tags from other markup, so you have keywords such as "cfquery", "cfoutput", and so on. Easily recognizable, short, sweet, easy to type. On the other hand, it uses a proprietary syntax for in-place variable insertion (eg., "#Name#" inserts the variable Name), so it's not all bliss. While I realize this stuff is somewhat subjective, from a technical viewpoint my opinion is that we're not there quite yet. Bring on the pitchforks and torches. :) -- Alexander Staubo http://www.mop.no/~alex/ "It has taken the planet Earth 4.5 billion years to discover it is 4.5 billion years old." --George Wald