[Zope3-dev] Re: [SpringCleaning07]

[Martijn Faassen]

Jim Washington wrote:
> Martijn Faassen wrote:
>> http://genshi.edgewall.org
>>
>> Inspired by Kid (in turn among others inspired by ZPT), the main 
>> template language of TurboGears, written by the people who also 
>> created Trac, and it seems to be getting traction. TurboGears among 
>> others is going to adopt it, but also things like the creator of 
>> SQLAlchemy (and Myghthy) spending time optimizing it, etc. It's close 
>> enough to ZPT to be palatable to me, and has some nice features for 
>> reuse.
>>
>> If we're going to get out of the server business we could also 
>> consider getting out of the template language business. :)

> I'm a big fan of using lxml.etree for templating.  Very pythonic, very 
> easy to refactor, very explicit.

Cool!

> It's premature to announce (we plan to have eggs on pypi soon) , but 
> take a look at zif.xtemplate at zif.sourceforge.net .  It's pretty alpha 
> at the moment, but it uses a DTD and some xpath to get around the "tags 
> that shouldn't be minimized" issue, and it includes a first stab at an 
> HTML sanitizer, to use when snippets of untrusted HTML are to be 
> included on a page.  In addition, the entire page DOM is available for 
> postprocessing right up until serialization.  Of course, those with 
> better lxml knowledge are encouraged to point out issues with the 
> implementation.

I just took a brief look at this. Do I understand that this templating 
solution basically generates the entire template from Python? There is 
no actual textual template present at all, right? I understand you could 
add them back and use XPath, the elementtree API and even XSLT to 
generate templates, but in the default there is no template?

I have used this approach when I needed to generate very particular XML, 
but for web templating I generally expect there to be a textual 
template. This way it becomes more easy to take a template created by a 
designer and integrate it into ones system. What are your thoughts about 
this?

Regards,

Martijn