[Web-SIG] Standardized template API

[Phillip J. Eby]

At 11:37 AM 2/4/2006 -0800, Ben Bangert wrote:
>I think the main reason Ian suggested it was because he wanted to
>implement his own lookup scheme to find templates. As I mentioned
>above, this begins to take us to the internals.... so I'm inclined to
>agree that its not going to help here.

Actually, I'm thinking that the whole discussion is definitely resembling 
OLE, at least as a conceptual model.  We have "linking" (symbolic 
identifier passed off to an engine that finds and returns the desired 
object) and we have "embedding", where the engine is just handed raw data 
or access to a place to store the object.  These are *both* useful things 
to do, even if some are what would currently be considered "internals" in 
some frameworks and template systems right now.

But they probably *both* deserve to be standardized, and then a given 
template or framework can support one or the other or both according to its 
choice and ability.  Thus, Myghty would be an example of a tool supporting 
linking (as a link resolver), but not embedding, so it would describe 
itself as supplying a WSGI link resolver.  My hypothetical 
templates-from-the-filesystem server would be an embedder, but wouldn't 
support linking (at least not directly), so it would describe itself as 
providing a WSGI resource container.

Anyway, we could then call the full spec "WELT" - WSGI Embedding, Linking, 
and Templates.  Our slogan could then be, "Got WELT?"  :)