Python embedded like PHP

[Andy Gimblett]

On Tue, Mar 19, 2002 at 12:03:46PM -0800, Ian Bicking wrote:

> Why, oh why, does it use HTML-like syntax?  People keep implementing
> templating languages that do this over and over, and it's a bad, bad
> idea.  Any moderately complex example of templating will violate the
> rules of HTML/SGML, with things like <img src="<al-value
> expr="something">">, which is horrible to read, will anger WYSIWYG
> editors to no end, and isn't at all necessary.

Yeah, this puts me off Albatross too...  I've just started playing
with Page Templates in Zope, and their approach seems excellent: it's
all done in _attributes_ without adding any new tags.

Have a look at this example (from
http://www.zope.org/Members/peterbe/DTML2ZPT):

<ul tal:define="sequence python:container.mydb.selectbyname(name='peter')">
  <li tal:repeat="item sequence">
    <span tal:replace="item/surname">surname</span>
  </li>
</ul>

Now, that's perfectly valid HTML, most WYSYWIG editors will basically
ignore the tal: attributes and render a single-element list, but the
ZPT machinery in Zope will pick that up and render a multi-element
list in a manner which I think it pretty obvious from looking at the
source.

In short, I think it's super-neato.  :-)

Now I need to figure out if it can be used outside of Zope.  AFAIK
there _aren't_ any non-Zope implementations, although the language has
definitely been designed to be general enough to allow its use
elsewhere.

-Andy

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Andy Gimblett - Programmer - Frontier Internet Services Limited
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