[Zope] DTML reformulated as XML (was RE: [Zope] <% ... %> ?)

[Hannu Krosing]

Jules Allen wrote:
> 
> It is *hard* to read DTML! Partly because my eyes aren't used to it and
> partly because my editors (vim and Homesite) don't know about DTML. In
> an earlier email either you or somebody else made a comment about having
> to write a syntax highlighter for each editor and what a drag it would
> be. Sure, any decent html editor will deal with <!-- --> correctly but
> it's a bigger drag for the newbie who doesn't know the syntax of the
> language.

I think that allowing \ as a line continuation would enable us to write 
much cleaner DTML. There are many places where proper rendering requires 
no whitespace but readability would need proper indentation.

so I want 

<textarea>\
  <!--#in "[1,2,3]"-->\
     <!--#var sequence-item html_quote-->,\
  <!--#/in-->\
</textares>

to be rendered as 

<textarea>1,2,3,</textarea>

the current (ugly) way to do is

<textarea><!--#in "[1,2,3]"
  --><!--#var sequence-item html_quote
    -->,<!--#/in
--></textares>

(btw, did I mention this is real ugly ;)

I have done this using re.sub(r"\\[ \t]*\n[ \n]*", "")
(or somthing similar, this is from memory)
on my DTML source before passing it to DocumentTemplate.HTML

the meaning is to remove the \ as the last non-whitespace char on line 
together with the \n and all the indenting whitespace on the next line.

> One of the sexiest PHP features is the syntax highlighter. If a site
> allows it. It's not a very whizzy example but take a look at
> 
>         http://www.php.net/docs.php3
> 
> and then take a look at
> 
>         http://www.php.net/source.php3?page_url=/docs.php3
> 
> That takes newbie "look, how did they do that?" questions to a "look
> how they did that!" level. Nice.
> 
> Is this already in Zope? And if it is, why couldn't I find it? (Hint:
> because you're a wickedly lazy individual, Jules)

Not syntax hilighting, but there is a "DTML source" link at the lower 
right of pages at www.zope.org

-----------------
Hannu