[Catalyst] HTML::Widget and output into a html table

[A. Pagaltzis]

* Dave Hodgkinson <davehodg at gmail.com> [2006-04-14 10:50]:
> If it's useful but with a crap syntax, isn't that an argument
> for having a meta-language do 90% of the Hard Stuff?

Sorta. The problem is that the syntax is expressed in XML
elements with long names, with complete avoidance of micro-
parsing. That means you get monstrosities like this:

    <xsl:call-template name="foo">
        <xsl:with-param name="bar" value="1" />
        <xsl:with-param name="baz" value="2" />
        <xsl:with-param name="quux" value="3" />
    </xsl:call-template>

which is equivalent to something like this in Perl:

    call_template foo => ( bar => 1, baz => 2, quux => 3 );

So what you really want is not a meta-language for XSLT, you want
more of a meta-syntax for XML with a few XSLT-specific shortcuts
built in. There’ve been attempts at that such as PXSL[1], but
they never gained much traction.

(I was all set to pick up PXSL until I discovered its macro
facilities. Similarly I hate how YAML picked up such constructs
at some point early in its life. In both cases it expands the
scope of the language from simple syntactic sugar to a language
in its own right, which massively complicates any general-purpose
tools you might want to write… and so I stopped caring. Pity,
because the most important 20% of the syntax is bloody brilliant
in both cases. Sigh.)

[1]: http://community.moertel.com/pxsl/

Regards,
-- 
Aristotle Pagaltzis // <http://plasmasturm.org/>