[Zope-CMF] Re: Meld2, was Re: Proposal for hooking rendering

[Martin Aspeli]

> It's a lot looser than knowing the whole DOM. You just need to know
> the IDs. And in some cases, only when an id is used in multiple
> places, you will need to know the id of its parent. That's the only
> mental model you need.  You don't need to have any idea what
> the tags are or how the page structure is arranged.

Okay, so say the template designer has a big <div id="documentBody"> where  
I am to put the document body. There is a different way of displaying that  
for each content type. Inside that, I need, say, an <h1>, a couple of  
<div>s and whole bunch of structural content for the actual document body.

Do I output those variable elements with python with print statements?

To be honest, I think I'm just a little uncomfortable with the  
"procedural" approach to templating, It seems a little poorly structured  
and prone to error, e.g. if I'd have to manipulate things in loops etc.  
Basically, instead of relying on syntax (e.g. TAL) that lets me declare  
what I want (put X here, loop over these), I'd have to rely on patterns  
and APIs in a fully-featured programming language. It seems a bit easy to  
miss a tag or treat something as iterable when it wasn't meant to.

To that extent, I prefer the separation of concerns in a scenario with  
Five views (i.e. view classes bound to logic, individually unit testable,  
well-defined boundary between view logic and presentation) and TAL  
expressions only. And again, for the "site themer" role, a layer on top of  
that like what Paul is describing sounds appealing.

(then again, I spent today learning Tiles, and either alternative is  
better than that ;-)

That's not to say your work isn't intriguing though. I reserve the right  
to become convinced. :-)

Martin

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(muted)