Outer Web Thought Log
April 14, 2003
xslt vs. template languages
Sam is considering remaking Gump using Python, and refers to Cheetah as a nice templating system. Stefano is on a quest for a non-XML variant of XSLT. Bruno is progressing on his form framework, and was questioning what the glue language should be between a form instance and its visualization. Come to think of it, I'm wondering why XSLT, XML and templating approaches cannot coexist. XSLT has its role for out-of-band, declarative transformation descriptions of a mostly static XML document into some other markup. As such, it has only access to the document content itself, and not per se to the transformation context. This means one needs to add an eventual transformation context into the document stream if its context needs to be considered upon transformation. OTOH, when looking at Cheetah, I'm charmed with its simplicity and unobstructive syntax: 

$title



#for $client in $clients

#end for


$client.surname, $client.firstname
$client.email
I can imagine myself feeding an XHTML form snippet through some FormTemplateTransformer: 

  #for $color in $myForm.colors[]
which translates this source document into:
This document can then be piped through a skinning XSLT stylesheet to provide you with the look & feel you want. Of course, all of this could be done with XSLT too, but a template approach might be much more intuistic here since all of the thinking required to build up that nice form is on one screen. An XSLT-like template language might provide us with a familiar syntax, and when freed of its side-effect-freeness, might also perhaps provide us with access to the transformation context. From there, we can easily merge context data (the form instance field values) into the document stream.
Posted by stevenn at April 14, 2003 02:37 PM ()