On 2010-11-10 01:25, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
"Eric Poggel"<dnewsgro...@yage3d.net> wrote in message
news:ibcn72$2u3...@digitalmars.com...
On 11/9/2010 12:17 AM, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
"Andrei Alexandrescu"<seewebsiteforem...@erdani.org> wrote in message
news:ibaepi$vf...@digitalmars.com...
People at Facebook told me that the adoption of D inside the company
might
be helped if they could simply write<?d ... ?> to insert D code into a
page. I'm not sure how difficult such a plugin would be to implement.
I'm very suprised by that. That's become considered very bad style by
most
of the [professional] web dev world quite awhile ago, and for very good
reason. Rails-, django- and even ASP.NET-style "pass variables into an
HTML
template" approaches have proven to be...well...frankly, much less
shitty.
I've always felt the opposite way. It's been a while since I've worked
with Asp.net controls, but I remember something like this:
<ul id="List"></ul>
.....
// Later, in C#
for (int i=0; i<10; i++)
List.innerHtml += "<li>" + sanitize(someArray[i]) +"</li>"
Ouch, yea, that is awful (but I've done worse - I once tried to build HTML
buy manually adding nodes to an XML DOM...it seemed like a good idea until I
actually started doing it). I've done very little with ASP.NET, and it's
been awhile since I've even looked at it, but my understanding is that
you're supposed to do it more like this:
<!-- template for defining a List here -->
<ul id="List"></ul>
<!-- template for defining a ListElem here -->
<li id="ListElem"></li>
someListElem.innerHtml = sanitize(someArray[i])
Or something vaguely like that anyway. Yea, it's definitely still not as
good as rails/django/haxeIgniter/etc, though. A good HTML templating system
like what those use won't lead you to HTML-string-concatenation. I just
mentioned ASP.NET because I seemed to remember it being template-based in
some way.
As far as I know you could create a framework using ASP.NET that is as
good as rails/django/haxeIgniter/etc. You could write almost the same
could as the PHP example below in ASP.NET, just replace <?php with <%
and <?= with <%=. Although it will look somewhat ugly at the end with <%
} %>
While php would do something like:
<ul id="List">
<?php foreach($someArray as $item):?>
<li><?=sanitize($item)?></li>
<?php endforeach?>
</ul>
Granted, C# is a much nicer language than php, and when in php, I always
separate model and controller logic from the html view, but the "immediate
mode" of php embedding helps me avoid the awkwardness of building html
through string concatenations in another file. I get to see the html
structure exactly as it is.
I could probably live with that as long as the "PHP template" stayed
view-only and didn't grow too much logic.
This is where people usually jump in and suggest a templating system, but
I think it's silly to invent a second language when the first is more than
up to the task. I always find myself thinking: I know how to do this in
php or java, but how do I do this in the templating language?
I welcome counter-arguments. Maybe I can be enlightened?
If you look up StringTemplate (related to ANTLR), there was a fairly
convincing explanation, although the more I think about it, I can't remember
what the hell it was (something about forcing excess logic to stay out of
the view, I guess, maybe...honestly I totally forget).
--
/Jacob Carlborg
