[Zope3-dev] Re: Encoding of the PageTemplateFile

[Philipp von Weitershausen]

Dmitry Vasiliev wrote:
> Hi!
> 
> Some time ago there has been a discussion on Zope3-Users list about 
> specifying an encoding of the PageTemplateFile like this:
> 
> <browser:page
>     template="tempalte.pt"
>     encoding="utf-8"
>     ...
> />
> 
> So there are some questions:
> 
> - Is anybody working on this?
> - What should be the default encoding if no encoding is given? UTF-8?
> - Can we include this functionality in Zope 3.1 release? I guess we at 
> least can set the default encoding of the PageTemplateFile to "UTF-8" 
> without any problems.

I wouldn't mind such a change, but I think it's a little too late for 
3.1. The first beta of 3.1 is already out, that means a feature freeze.

In the long term, I would rather have this specified the way it should 
be with XML data: using an <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?> 
processing instructions.

The reason this doesn't work right now (or, I should say, work the way 
you'd expect it) is because the PageTemplate machinery makes the (now 
unnecessary) distinction between HTML and XML. It uses two different 
parsers for those; that way it can support SGML-based HTML4. HTML mode 
is the default, XML mode gets triggered by an <?xml ?> processing 
instruction like the one above.

Apart from enforcing XML syntax, XML mode also requires you to 
explicitly provide definitions for the TAL, METAL and i18n namespaces (I 
think this is a good thing because a) it's the standard and b) people 
from other technologies know standard and are tired of Zope constantly 
cooking its own soup). Also, macros from XML PageTemplates are 
incompatible with macros from HTML PageTemplates.

So, to conclude, I would propose to rip out HTML mode of PageTemplates 
completely in the long term. Everyone nowadays uses XHTML, the drawbacks 
are (apart from the required namespace declarations) none and the 
benefits apart from the discussed encoding issue are a) less code to 
maintain and b) compliance with standards.

Philipp