Bertrand Delacretaz wrote: <snip/>
I think we need
a) "data templates" (for a lack of a better word), to generate XML out of data (what JXTG does now),
and
b) "presentation templates" downstream to convert the XML to HTML or other presentation markup (currently covered by XSLT, far from ideal)
- oo -
For a), JXTG does a good job currently, but having a single mechanism for both would make a big difference in the number of things that people have to learn to be productive with Cocoon.
For b), being dreamweaver-compatible would be a big plus, allowing less technical people to create templates themselves. Using Dreamweaver or not, that's not the point: DW-compatibility also means that the templating system is "simple enough" for such people to grasp.
b) would be nice but it is quite complicated to implement in an efficient way. One can of course stream the transformer input to a DOM tree that is made available in the context object and then let a JXTG like script work on that. But the question is if we would be happy wih the performance. Otherwise we would need to build a more light weight tree representation of XML and write adapters to it so that it work with an XPath processor, Jaxen e.g. Or maybe there are light weight XML tree implementations that we could reuse.
Didn't like the Phyton syntax, but we can certainly find some good ideas from it.
- oo -
To me, TAL's design looks simple for simple things, yet powerful and extensible. Looks like an example to follow, maybe even like a spec to adopt instead of reinventing it..
/Daniel
