[Zope] Re: Java re-invents DTML :-)

Evan Simpson evan@4-am.com
Fri, 14 Feb 2003 10:49:50 -0600


Kevin Carlson wrote:
> Come on folks.  There's nothing wrong with supporting two templating 
> languages.  Quite honestly, dtml is much easier to learn for most and 
> has it's place in application development -- just as ZPT does.

Quite true.  DTML can be very handy for templating non-tag-based text.

On the other hand, DTML has several misfeatures and drawbacks that ought 
to be fixed, and leveraging TALES may be a good way to do it.  For 
example, instead of:

<dtml-with x><dtml-with y><dtml-var z></dtml-with></dtml-with>
...or...
<dtml-var expr="x['y'].z()">

...we could have...

<dtml-var name="x/y/z">

Another advantage would be the ability to control context, writing 
"here/foo" to acquire a foo object and "request/foo" to get request 
variable "foo".

This was proposed way back when, but nobody has had the time to do it :-(

Cheers,

Evan @ 4-am