Matt Sergeant wrote:
> But then if you're happy with EmbPerl, why switch?
A couple of reasons, really:
1) well, I actually wouldn't switch per se; people think in
different ways, and it's often useful to support (and feel
comfortable with) different development paradigms
2) EmbPerl is great, but if you're undisciplined it's very
easy to mix content and presentation
Like a lot of other people, I suspect, I've written my own ad hoc
pipelining templating system several times over. E.g., when I did
a system in 1997 called the Quran Browser
http://www.stg.brown.edu/webs/quran_browser/
I created a back end that vended just the text, with very simple
markup. The HTML is all added by the front end.
While this made maintenance easy in some respects (you can add new
texts, replace old ones, etc. without changing having to do much
work on the front end), I found that pipelining tended to make the
front end (in AxKit terms, the stylesheet) unnecessarily complex
and hard to maintain. For very simple systems, it's not a big
deal. But the more complex and interactive the system is, the more
I actually have come to prefer the callback paradigm (like Embperl).
The problem here is that if you're not careful, the callback para-
digm leads to the very sort of mixing of content and presentation
that makes changing either very difficult (e.g., try upgrading an
Embperl system from HTML to XML, or even XHTML).
So actually I'm not looking to move away from Embperl towards AxKit
so much as try to keep my foot on both sides of the line. The call-
back paradigm is good for some things. And the pipelining is good
for others.
Is AxKit the best of the pipelining breed, though? (I personally
am finding XML to be a ghastly, ugly thing; it all started with
namespaces, which are implemented via attributes in a horribly
kludgy way - and now we're finding new schema mechanisms entering
in, plus complex and unintuitive beasts like XSL. So I wonder just
how slick AxKit can possibly be, given its foundation in these
technologies.)
--
Richard Goerwitz [EMAIL PROTECTED]
tel: 401 438 8978
