[Zope] The new DTML syntax

[Martijn Pieters]

At 17:22 06/08/99 , Alexander Staubo wrote:
>The discussion could not have happened a month ago because nobody had
>spent any serious amount of time with the syntax. Time is not an issue
>here, or at least it shouldn't be. We're talking about a feature of Zope
>that, once established, we'll be living with for ever after.
>
>Besides, migration problems isn't the issue. I don't see the difficulty.
>There's no particular reason why Zope shouldn't be able to apply the
>changes automatically, for example.
>
>My contention is that the new syntax is significantly less readable and
>far too verbose. It's not really about keystrokes (the new syntax three
>characters shorter than the SSI syntax). The new syntax detracts from
>the idea of DTML as an expressive language -- why, if I had to prefix
>every word I spoke with the word "dtml", that wouldn't be so great.
>Because dtml-eventually dtml-you'd dtml-have dtml-to dtml-learn dtml-to
>dtml-filter dtml-out dtml-the dtml-dummy dtml-words. But in the world of
>natural languages, "dtml-if" isn't a word; it's two words; we learn, by
>convention, to split such hyphenated constructs into separate words. Our
>mind works best with individual words. Why go against the grain and
>teach the brain a new thing?
>
>Afaik, there's no technical reason to prefer the "dtml-" prefix to
>something like "z-" or "dt". Is "dtml-in" somehow more unique in the
>world of markup languages than "dtin"? In the future when we're using
>XML namespaces, will we be writing "dtml:dtml-in"?
>
>I'm not surprised that DC dominates the negatively-charged end of the
>discussion, but this is supposed to be an open-source development
>project, so I suggest a good, clean discussion on the topic and then a
>vote.

I have been using the new syntax for quite a while now. I have absolutely 
no problem in filtering out the dtml- prefix, just like I won't have any 
problems filtering out the z- prefix, or any other, _provided_ the prefix 
ends in a hyphen! It would be much harder to filter out the prefix without 
that clear delimiter.

And no prefix would remove the possibility of defining our own dtml tags 
arbitrarily, like <dtml-html>, or to recognize custom dtml-tags in code not 
written by yourself. And believe me, I look at a lot of code written by others.

I vote for a syntax where there is a prefix with a hyphen. Be it z- or 
dtml-, it doesn't matter that much to me in typing effort.

--
Martijn Pieters, Web Developer
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