[Zope-dev] Re: [ZPT] Order of attribute execution Feature Request

[Jeffrey P Shell]

On 5/10/02 4:53 AM, "Chris Withers" <chrisw@nipltd.com> wrote:

> Jim Penny wrote:
>> 
>> on the surface, to be pretty ugly.  I have said that there are three
>> specific things I dislike about ZPT -- 0)  lots of things have changed
>> spelling again -- request v. REQUEST, here v. context v. container v.
>> this v. ? 
> 
> Yeah, there was absolutely no need for this and I did find it extremely
> frustrating. That
> said, the whole area has always been a mess, particularly in DTML. I do,
> however, wish
> that Script (Python)'s and ZPT could have been consistent :-((

Me too.  I keep typing 'here' in Python Scripts now.  While I know I can
change the bindings, I'm sure that would just make more confusion for me
down the road.

In regards to request v. REQUEST, I do like the page templates spelling.
'request' is just another path root, and all path roots are lower case.

> 1) infix notation that makes program scansion hard,
> 
> You don't HAVE to use infix ;-)
> 
> <tr tal:repeat="x xes">
> <td tal:content="x/id">an ID</td>
> </tr>
> 
> ...can also be written as:
> 
> <tal:x repeat="x xes">
> <tr>
> <td><tal:x replace="x/id"/></td>
> </tr>
> </tal:x>

I think this is another good feature of ZPT which seems almost like a side
benefit of XML Namespace usage (and instead of 'tal:x', you can also use
more meaningful terms like 'tal:loop').  As for program 'scansion', I don't
view a Page Template as program.  But I think programmer readability can be
achieved just by good formatting.  And when using some HTML tools, whether
they're text oriented, visually, or both, some of them hilight unknown
attributes differently.  GoLive 6 by default colorizes unknown
attributes/tags in orange, while known ones are in blue.  Attribute values
remain in brown.  So, a combination of good formatting and a half decent
editor can yield good usability.  If these are problems for the
pure-programming set, there is still DTML.  And, if anyone can plug in a
good XSLT processor, that could open up another alternative templating
system.  XHTML aware editors should present the least amount of problems, as
namespaces (in theory) shouldn't cause any confusion.

>> 2) the
>> order of operations, which I think is baroque.  Six levels of precendence
>> for eight statements is pretty amazing.  And it is certainly harder to
>> explain/remember than "things happen in the order you specify."
> 
> *shrugs* I've done a u-turn on this. Tim's comments make it perfectly obvious
> why this needs to be the case, and at least it is very well defined what order
> things happen in (as Ken pointed out). My only beef is that define sometimes
> happens in an order that is less helpful than it could be ;-)
> 
> <tal:x repeat="fish fishes"
>      define="species fish/species">
> 
> ...doesn't do what I'd like it to ;-)

Evan Simpson explained this to me once in a way that made sense, but I can't
remember what it is right now.

[SNIP!]

-- 
Jeffrey P Shell
www.cuemedia.com




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