Web templating/db tool with best designer/coder separation?

[Paul Boddie]

Stefan Franke <franke at ableton.com> wrote in message news:<b988iucdo9ikjimp4ocrl5t170rqksuvnd at 4ax.com>...
> 
> What makes we wonder is, that XMLC was at least mentioned on zope-dev
> along with the abandonment of Hiperdom in favour of the upcoming ZPT
> about two years ago - as a quick archive search yielded.
> 
> Nevertheless it didn't have influence any influence on the design of ZPT.
> Or were there any deliberate design decisions against this approach?

I'm not familiar with the ZPT design process, but there are several
advantages in having some kind of "declarative" template language
which automatically reflects the state of data structures (like DTML
does with the looping and value tags, for example) without needing
programmatic intervention behind the scenes. Certainly, it can be
easier to verify whether a template is going to present the correct
data, and to do it properly, if there's no run-time activity which can
change the nature of the data being presented.

It certainly seems very elegant to use a DOM-like API to edit parts of
a Web page, for example, and I would argue that the ability to isolate
a document structure (around the data being represented) within
another document structure (that describing the final output) is
almost essential to separate presentation from logic. However, it's
arguably tedious to write lots of stuff for a DOM API, not to mention
having to maintain such code (in addition to the other stuff) when the
fundamental data structures in a particular system need changing.

Paul