On Mon, 28 Jul 2003, Andy Wardley wrote: > Jean-Michel Hiver wrote: > > Because Petal templates have to be well-formed XML, > > XML syntax is crufty at best.
There's a lot in XML that is needless, but like perl still has a dump() function, we just say "don't use that then". At it's core, XML is a very elegant syntax for defining a rich dataset of nodes, and solves many of the problems that text markup systems still struggle with reinventing (such as different encodings - YAML for example forces everyone's document to be in one of the UTF encodings). > It requires you to be strict and tediously > correct with every character. Many believe this is a good thing with a templating language. Let the browser be flexible in what it can receive, but let us, as professionals, be strict in what we generate. > You have to shoe-horn the semantics of your > complex directives into the limited syntax of element-name-and-attributes. > The language becomes contrived and clumsy as a result of trying to satisfy > a purity of design. This I can agree with, having written my own templating system because I didn't like XSLT's idea of being written in XML :-) But I now use XSLT, because it has other benefits (portable, fast, etc). > and you find yourself tied down to only generating valid > XML (which few real world web pages are, even if they should be). My web pages come out as HTML 4.0 transitional, not XHTML, and they are generated with XSLT. They often omit closing tags where appropriate for HTML. I don't do any fancy post-processing. Sorry Andy, but the above is not true at all. > Vive la difference! As you can see in evidence (Apache::AxKit::Language::*), I agree. -- <!-- Matt --> <:->get a SMart net</:-> Spam trap - do not mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
