[Zope] Re: [midgard-dev] ZPT, a next-generation template technology

[Evan Simpson]

From: "Emiliano" <emile@iris-advies.com>
> There's a number of things in the TALES bit which explicitly refer to
> Zope entities. We'd need to rework this to more generalized entities.

Most of the stuff in the TALES document describes our particular
implementation of TALES.  Path expressions, in particular, are quite
tailored to the Zope environment.  These details could certainly be adopted
by another implementation, but the only thing that is really intrinsic to
TALES is the idea of expression types, and the syntax "typename:expression
text".

> Regarding the metal macros: inserting the entire macro but in fact only
> allowing the editing of slots could lead to confusion. In the example on
> http://www.zope.org/Wikis/DevSite/Projects/ZPT/METAL, I assume that if I
> edit the text 'Links' in doc2, save it, then reedit, that particular
change
> would be gone. Which would be counter to what I expect.

We worked for a while with the idea of propagating changes to inserted
macros back to the macro definition, but it raised too many questions that
we weren't prepared to answer.  I hope that we can find ways to mark macro
bodies read-only that can be made compatible with the most popular HTML
editors.

> Also, if macros call macros themselves, would this be unfolded
> in its entirety every time I edit?

Yes. The idea of macros is to make the editor's copy match the rendered page
as closely as is reasonable.  This way, the person responsible for layout
and visual design isn't confronted with a broken page, or one missing
significant structural elements.

Cheers,

Evan @ digicool