Re: template engine...why???

On Wed, 30 Apr 2003, Robert Cummings wrote: > Hmmm that's awfully blocky looking, a real flattening out of the principle > of a template. Now let me see, my designers think that the output from menu() > sucks, or the output from leadArticle() sucks, ... Are you to tell me your > developers are doing the design of the HTML within the included templates > and functions? Gee what a waste of their talents. At some point your solution > ALWAYS breaks down to a coder putting html into functions for the designers > to use. This is somewhat true of templates, but the re-usability of your > method versus the template method is questionable. That all depends on how you manage your projects. On really large-scale stuff you have people who do nothing but create content. The last thing you want them to do is decide that they don't like the output of a particular macro. The designers have designed those macro tags for site-wide consistency. It all comes down to how you define templating. You seem to be defining it to be a system for simplifying the design and layout of pages. Which is a perfectly reasonable definition, but a tool/architecture that meets that definition is going to be inherently different from a tool/architecture that addresses the problem of simplifying content generation within a predefined overall layout and design. -Rasmus