Here's where I'm at on templates. Feel free to critique.
[snip]
I have to admit there is interesting value in your "everything is a transformer" position. There are two things I dislike:
1) your pipelines are big and complex
beans
|
v
file -> xslt/stx -> template -> xslt/stx -> htmlvs.
beans | v template -> xslt/stx -> html
But it's true that your pipeline can be rewritten using a virtual generator, so
template := file -> xslt/stx -> template-trans
so that the above pipeline can be the exact same, therefore it's not such a big problem.
2) at the end, the template is not a file, but the result of a pipeline fragment. In short, the template that DW designers will have to use is a pipeline view, not a file on a disk.
This means that in order to allow DW designers to edit their pages, you have to create a special section of the website, hopefully webdav enabled, so that they can open/edit/save those "virtual files"... also, you need the ability for your first transformation stage to be reversible.
I've tried the above a few times in the past and without much success I have to say.
In short, the need for people to use existing tools to edit the templates forces you to have them as files, which forces you to have the template system as a generator (unless, you can come up with some clever general purpose yet reversible transformation stage since I couldn't and convince people to use webdav-enabled URL spaces just to have their designers work on the templates).
-- Stefano.
