OT: Templating systems (was RE: [Catalyst] New default screen for Catalyst)

[Andrew Ford]

Nigel Metheringham wrote:

>On Wed, 2005-10-19 at 10:41 -0400, Thomas, Mark - BLS CTR wrote:
>...
>  
>
>>Personally, I don't see how HTML::Template is any different from how I
>>use TT, except:
>>    
>>
>...
>  
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>>3. Your HTML templates cannot be validated as proper HTML.
>>    
>>
>
>Actually you can, as long as you use the alternative form of tags where
>they are embedded in <!-- --> comments.
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>
When I am dealing with TT templates that others are going to edit with 
dreamweaver I set my tags to:

    START_TAG => qr{(?:\[|<!--\s*)%}
    END_TAG   => qr{%(?:\s*-->|\])}

This allows me to put comments in places like tables, like so:

    <table>
    <!--% FOREACH row IN rows %-->
    <tr><td>... </td></tr>
    <!--% END %-->
    </table>

and have the page source validate.  I can use standard [% / %] tags in 
textual element content too if I want.

I also think that code like:

    <!--% name = "foo" %-->

stands out more in the HTML source than:

<TMPL_VAR NAME=FOO>


IMO the magic incantation (<!--% and %-->) is more distinctive than 
pseudo-HTML.

Andrew

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