[Mailman-Developers] Templating the interface

[A.M. Kuchling]

On Tue, May 01, 2007 at 09:41:58AM -0400, Barry Warsaw wrote:
> initially and ran into problems there too.  He may have moved to  
> Genshi toward the end of the project.  I know there are many other  
> templating systems out there, such as PTL (from Quixote) but I don't  
> have much experience with them.  I would encourage folks who have  

I think the critical question is audience: who will be customizing
Mailman?  Can we assume they know XML?  can they keep their HTML
well-formed XML? will they use an HTML editor or just a text editor
like vi/emacs?

Some toolkits (Genshi, ZPT, Nevow) demand that the input be
well-formed XML and work to ensure their output is well-formed.
Here's an example from the Nevow for python.org:

      <n:slot name="items">
      <n:invisible n:pattern="item">

      <li class="group">
        <a href="/web"><n:attr name="href"><n:slot name="href" /></n:attr><n:slot name="label" /></a>
      </li>

This produces <a href="{content of href slot}">{content of label
slot}</a>.

Other toolkits don't enforce this: you write something like:

        <ul class="quicklinks">
        %for link_2, level3_links in level2_links:
          <li>${link_2.as_html()}</li>
        %endfor
        </ul>

Make a typo and change </li> to </lo>, and this will happily generate
bad HTML.  But it's also easier to hack away at a page and generate
output, albeit possibly-invalid output.

So, who do we picture customizing Mailman's templates?  Core
developers?  Sysadmins?  Skilled web designers?  Beginning web
designers?

(I'd rule out Quixote's PTL: too idiosyncratic, and Mailman's target
audience may want to customize the look while not knowing Python.
Plus the import hook complicates life.)

--amk