On March 8, 2004 at 18:46, Roger Wong wrote: > > Or better, have a complete template for each page type > > vs the separate layout resources. > > I whole-heartedly agree with this statement/suggestion! Having separate > resources to deal with--though probably more flexible--is a major pain. I > just went through customizing them all to fit my personal needs, but it took > me 3 days and I think it should've taken me just 1. (Disclaimer: I'm a > graphic designer, not a techie.) I would have loved to be able to just > create 3 HTML pages (date index, thread index, and message index) with > special '$' tags and be done with it. Instead I had to go through probably a > couple dozen resources to get OK results.
The big problems are: * Compatibility: Any big change like this introduces compatibility issues. Of course, compatibility could be ignored, which would cause a "fork" in MHonArc. * Loop-based constructs: The index pages are the best examples. Someone mentioned using the Perl Template Tookit, but I have yet to evaluate it. Regardless, I consider such changes a major change to MHonArc and probably an incompatible change to existing releases. If (when) such changes are made, they should be part of a rewrite. --ewh