[Zope3-dev] Re: XML header and TAL interpretor

[Philipp von Weitershausen]

Tonico Strasser wrote:
> Philipp von Weitershausen schrieb:
> 
>> Tonico Strasser wrote:
>>
>>> Philipp von Weitershausen schrieb:
>>>
>>>
>>>> Tonico Strasser wrote:
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>> Philipp von Weitershausen schrieb:
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>> I'm not so sure that this is such a good thing. ZPT seems to enforce
>>>>>> *guidelines* that not everyone might want to follow (e.g. if I
>>>>>> want to
>>>>>> output my XHTML as c14n or something similar). For me, ZPT's HTML
>>>>>> mode
>>>>>> just does too many things, most of which won't hurt to be the
>>>>>> template
>>>>>> author's responsibility. I definitely consider <br/> vs. <br />
>>>>>> one of
>>>>>> them.
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> You have different use cases, obviously. For me, HTML mode is a good
>>>>> thing including <br/> to <br /> conversion. (I don't like to write <br
>>>>> /> all the time, all our web pages are served as text/html for
>>>>> non-XHTML
>>>>> browsers like MSIE, and we follow the compatibility guidelines from
>>>>> the
>>>>> XHTML standard).
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> That's good and I agree that there should be tools that aid you in
>>>> making your HTML work better with the guidelines. But if that means
>>>> introducing weird obstacles for ZPT authors, I don't think these tools
>>>> should be part of the ZPT renderer. If you don't want to write <br />
>>>> all the time, use a "guideline compliance maker" tool (maybe xmllint
>>>> will do) and feed your template to it... Templating XML is part of
>>>> ZPT's
>>>> job; I question if it should do much more at this point.
>>>
>>> But that's why ZTPs have HTML mode, no?
>>
>> Yes. But rather than helping us, those features are more and more in our
>> way. And with XML and HTML modes being incompatible, I rather opt for
>> XML mode and sacrifice a small convenience that I could even bring back
>> by using additional tools.
>>
>>>>> I agree that it should be possible to trigger XML mode without the
>>>>> prolog for use cases like yours.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> That won't help because HTML mode macros and XML mode macros aren't
>>>> compatible. I really would like to see XML be the default, including
>>>> Zope 3's skin macros.
>>>
>>>
>>> Yes, would also like to see this.
>>
>> Ah, good. It wasn't at all clear that you actually supported the
>> proposal :).
> 
> Yes, if it's still possible to trigger HTML mode. But what about
> backwards compatibility if we make XML the default mode?

Well, the namespace stuff would probably account for a major breakage.
Thus, over the span of two Zope releases, XML mode could be forgiveful
when people forget to register namespace declarations. Of course, it
would render deprecation warnings.

I can't imagine a smooth transition for the other "features" of HTML
mode because they are like on/off switches. Either you convert <br/> to
<br /> or you don't. Same with <script ...></script> vs. <script ... />
and the other things.

I think it's time to sketch out a proposal :).

Philipp