From: "Emiliano" <emile@iris-advies.com>
There's a number of things in the TALES bit which explicitly refer to Zope entities. We'd need to rework this to more generalized entities.
Most of the stuff in the TALES document describes our particular implementation of TALES. Path expressions, in particular, are quite tailored to the Zope environment. These details could certainly be adopted by another implementation, but the only thing that is really intrinsic to TALES is the idea of expression types, and the syntax "typename:expression text".
Regarding the metal macros: inserting the entire macro but in fact only allowing the editing of slots could lead to confusion. In the example on http://www.zope.org/Wikis/DevSite/Projects/ZPT/METAL, I assume that if I edit the text 'Links' in doc2, save it, then reedit, that particular change would be gone. Which would be counter to what I expect.
We worked for a while with the idea of propagating changes to inserted macros back to the macro definition, but it raised too many questions that we weren't prepared to answer. I hope that we can find ways to mark macro bodies read-only that can be made compatible with the most popular HTML editors.
Also, if macros call macros themselves, would this be unfolded in its entirety every time I edit?
Yes. The idea of macros is to make the editor's copy match the rendered page as closely as is reasonable. This way, the person responsible for layout and visual design isn't confronted with a broken page, or one missing significant structural elements. Cheers, Evan @ digicool