[Zope3-dev] Re: Re: tal:define="..." considered harmful?

[Jean-Marc Orliaguet]

Martijn Faassen wrote:

>
> I don't think it has an implementation of string TALES expressions.
>
> It's parsing anything that's actually *inside* the attributes you add 
> on HTML with tal, such as detecting whether a TALES expression type 
> identifier is used ('string:' or 'python:', say), or 'structure', and 
> the right splitting of tal:repeat="foo bar" (into 'foo' and 'bar'), 
> and semicolons for multiple attributes with tal:attributes, and so on. 
> I just literally ported that code to javascript from Zope's 
> implementation  so it follows the established rules pretty well.
>

OK, now I get it :-)

in the CTAL implementation this is done for each type of rule 
(ctal:content, ctal:attributes, ...) using  ctal.eval_expr() or 
ctal.get_nameexpr() or eval_pathexpr(). Could be good to have a single 
method for parsing the expressions.

> [snip]
>
>>> More in general, it's possible that some template will receive two 
>>> sets of data that's quite separate from each other. I like 
>>> namespaces then too. You can of course always argue that such a 
>>> template should be factored into multiple smaller ones, though the 
>>> question remains how they'd each receive only their data and not the 
>>> rest.
>>
>
>> what I mean it that the structures can always be merged before they 
>> are passed to the template, then the data can be organized as:
>>
>> data = {
>>  items: [ ...],
>>  people: [],
>>  somemoredata: {}
>> }
>>
>> ZPT does a mapping between several data structures (context, request, 
>> view ...) and the variables with the same name in TAL, which results 
>> in several namespaces. Such variables are very platform-dependent and 
>> a templating language basically needs only one data structure to do 
>> the rendering..
>
>
> I'm not sure I understand fully... Perhaps you mean this:
>
> A pattern in templating is to prepare the data fully in nested 
> dictionaries and lists with simple strings and integers inside before 
> the data is pushed along to a template, as opposed to the template 
> pulling it out of request and context and view individually (with 
> method calls, often). Perhaps you are referring to this pattern. I 
> like this pattern, as it has positive qualities concerning 
> debuggability, modularity, loose coupling and makes possible various 
> performance optimizations.
>
> XSLT and ClearSilver are templating languages which have this pattern. 
> TAL can be made to follow this pattern with some small modifications.
>
> Regards,
>
> Martijn


Yes, that's what I mean. Clearsilver is a good example. There are 
several advantages:

- the data structures are platform-independent (they can be encoded in 
JSON, C, python), and they can be easily converted from one language to 
another, even to and from XML,  this simplifies the transport too (e.g. 
in Ajax, webservices)

- the template does less, it does not need to know anything about zope, 
it works faster, the data access from inside the template is not an 
access to the ZODB ...

- it is possible to create a simple schema definition from the data 
structure itself (this is what I've done in the Ajax toolkit I'm writing)
  for instance from:

  data {
    "personid": 123,
    "name": "bill"
    "info": {..},
    "phonenumbers": []
  }

  one can deduce a simple schema like:

  schema = {
    "personid": int,
    "name": string,
    "info": dict,
    "phonenumbers": list
  }

  of course this works only on the first-level of the structure, but 
this is enough in many use cases to make sure that an integer field for 
example does not all of a sudden become a list. This can be used to 
enforce a storage policy.

Regards
/JM