On Sat, 4 Dec 2004, Daniel Fagerstrom wrote:
snip...
if(<test>) ----------
example:
<div do="if(count(cart/item) == 0)"> Your cart is empty <div>
How would you implement choose/when?
I woudn't, don't think it works that well with Dreamweaver and such things. You can use a number of if instead. I would also assume that there is an upper bound on complexity when "fill in the blanks"-style templating isn't feasible anymore and when it becomes more or less meaningsless to try to edit it in dreamweaver. In such cases rule based templates are better.
Anyway, my Dreamweaver experience is quite limited, I used it for implementing a site design from Illustrator to HTML and CSS. It was fun for a short while. But I'm not the right kind of person for using dreamweaver. I'm fanatic in avoiding any style elements in HTML so I do everything in CSS and DWs CSS support didn't impress me. So after a while I went back to emacs again :)
Hopefully people that have succeded in using DW to their advantage will tell whats needed and usefull.
snip...
Several directives ------------------
So, how do we handle multiple directives for one element? We could handle the TAL example above like:
<p do="let(x=/a/long/path/from/the/root;if(x);content(x/txt);attributes(class=x/class)"> Ex Text </p>
Isn't there a risk that attribute templates become unreadable?
As said above, I don't think they are intended for complicated designs. I would use XSLT in such cases. My example above was chosen more for desscribing the mechanism than for being realistic.
Furthermore I forgot a paranthese in a place that was quite bad from a pedagogical POV. It should have been:
<p do="let(x=/a/long/path/from/the/root);if(x);content(x/txt);attributes(class=x/class)">
Ex Text
</p>
I find it actually quite readable, but thats probably because I designed it ;) and also have spend a lot of time with functional programming languages (e.g. that in Mathematica). You can think of ';' as functional composition.
snip...
Connection to JXTG ------------------
The directives are almoust defined in such a way that they could be translated to a tag based templating language like:
directive(param_1=value_1,...,param_n=value_n)
<=>
<jx:directive param_1="value_1" ... param_n="value_n"/>
Maybe we could find a attribute directive language that allows for complete correspondance. And make tag or directive syntax selectible and in such way make this effort compatble with JXTG?
I like this idea very much. It would be a shame if the quirks of Dreamweaver should force everyone to use an awkward syntax.
The attribute driven synatax is new to me so I don't know if I find it awkward or not, I'll need to see some larger examples. Anyway, we have a user community (and our own webbaps) to think about, we cannot change dirrection at every whim. We must support JXTG for the forseable future so I would prefer if we could allow both syntaxes.
Now, it will be interesting to see how long time it will take before someone explains that: this is FS we only need to support one syntax, namely the obviously optimal one, and those who believe that they need the other one are generally less knowing and doesn't understand their own best ;)
/Daniel
