With practical experience on multi-person teams with tech people and design people with both DTML and ZPT, I can easily say this is just plain wrong. Document structure is best expressed and most portable in XML. There are less unknown factors in XML because the rules are clear. Coding XHTML (or even HTML) in ZPT scales better because there is less magic, and a clearer separation between code and design. I know you can do almost as well in well-written DTML, but this leads to problems in the real world (read: hacks that mess with this separation). Also, ZPT can do non-HTML non-XML content fine, you just need to be careful about whitespace if that matters (as you do in dtml). See Chris W's argument here. It's damn awful to try and have a designer/interface-developer try to redesign a site that has interface code built in DTML. It's especially awful if you are the person that has to give them tech support and pray they do not break the code by changing the presentation. DTML just doesn't scale to non-techies or content people who are talented at HTML, but not 'programming.' Sean -----Original Message----- From: Terry Hancock [mailto:hancock@anansispaceworks.com] Sent: Monday, February 17, 2003 7:07 PM To: zope@zope.org Subject: Re: [Zope] Re: Java re-invents DTML :-) On Monday 17 February 2003 09:01 am, Chris Withers wrote:
Kevin Carlson wrote:
Come on folks. There's nothing wrong with supporting two templating languages. Quite honestly, dtml is much easier to learn for most and has it's place in application development
DTML has worked pretty much flawlessly for me. I have *NEVER* encountered any of the bugaboos about obfuscation or excessive code in it that have been claimed to be its faults. I use it in an admittedly complex presentation layer, and it provides excellent support for everything I need to do there. Python does the heavy lifting just fine, and I see no reason to change this part of my design.
...not unless some of its major current flaws are corrected. I think this is possible but I don't see the point of having two templating languages for one app server especially as we're now getting to the stage where you need to know _both_ before you can do anything useful with Zope :-(
Okay, I'm game, let's give ZPT the boot. It's a much more specialized language (HTML documents *only*), looks *really* obfuscated. Stuffs all its code into HTML attributes which is great for hiding the code away, but awful if you want to see the document structure. DTML and Python work fine together, and are capable of handling the whole range of tasks I need. ZPT+Python cannot. So ZPT is neither necessary nor sufficient. Terry -- Terry Hancock ( hancock at anansispaceworks.com ) Anansi Spaceworks http://www.anansispaceworks.com _______________________________________________ Zope maillist - Zope@zope.org http://mail.zope.org/mailman/listinfo/zope ** No cross posts or HTML encoding! ** (Related lists - http://mail.zope.org/mailman/listinfo/zope-announce http://mail.zope.org/mailman/listinfo/zope-dev )