[ZPT] My First Post

[richard@bizarsoftware.com.au]

Hi all,

ZPT rocks. Had to get that out in the open :)

These comments come after one end-to-end read of the TALES, TAL and METAL
1.0 specification pages. My apologies in advance if I'm offending anyone
who has spent far too much time (possibly in far too many meetings) already
working through this stuff.

TAL statements: define, attributes, condition, content, replace, repeat
    - why is attributes plural? It may be used to define a single attribute
replacement. Similarly, define may be used for either a single or multiple
definition. So as far as I'm concerned, attributes should just be
attribute. Or define should be definitions. One or the other. Or is it just
Too Late to be bringing this stuff up?


In my reading, I found a couple of "bonus" attribute names used in the
documentation. In the TAL spec under Define, there's an example:

   tal:define="mytitle template/title; tlen python:len(local.mytitle)"

I presume that TAL has created the "builtin" attribute in the TALES
namespace called 'local'? Is there a 'global'? Is there anything else? I
know there's a 'repeat' for the repeat statement. If 'global' doesn't exist
as an attribute, should it?

Similarly, METAL creates a 'macros' attribute (again, this is plural when
we have 'local'). I don't believe METAL creates any other attributes. The
attribute is mentioned almost as an aside in the documentation.

I guess it'd just be nice to have these new attributes explicitly listed
somewhere like they are in the TALES spec. I just don't want to get into
the situation we have with DTML where there's inconsistencies and
documentation that, for a very long time, ignored or "obscured" some very
useful features.


    Richard

-- 
Richard Jones
richard@bizarsoftware.com.au
Senior Software Developer, Bizar Software (www.bizarsoftware.com.au)