On Sun, 2006-01-22 at 11:44 +0100, Dirk Meyer wrote:
> Cliff Wells wrote:
> > That's not the point.  The software is poorly thought out and this is a
> > merely a single symptom.  TurboGears uses Kid as its default template
> > system and while most people like it on the surface, about half the
> > traffic on the list has to do with its shortcomings and frailties.
> > "Kid templates are a pain to debug" was an especially long thread.
> 
> I looked at TurboGears and while it looks great on the outside,
> TurboGears itself seems to be a huge monster, starting with the
> easy_install stuff ... not s easy at all. For our webserver I'm
> planing to use CherryPy, just like TurboGears. For CherryPy, every
> page is a function in Python which needs to return a valid HTML
> page. For the canvas system I'm thinking of something similar: every
> event or change in the skin is a python callback function. 

Oh, I wasn't suggesting TG.  I was pointing out that TG users like the
*idea* of Kid, but they also suffer under its bad implementation.  That
being said, TurboGears is rapidly developing and is pulling Kid
development forward with it, so it may be that Kid gets some major
overhauls that address the issues.

> Well, XML is a markup language, Python is not. 

Markup is simply a data structure rendered in a particular way.  Both
XML and Python can adequately describe data structures.  Python just
does it without so much typing and clutter.

> I guess they see the correlation, but the second is more familiar. 

And I'll concede that familiarity may encourage designers to at least
make the initial plunge.


> We won't do that much in the xml file anyway. Basicly we will need Kid
> for some 'if' statements in the code, similar to the current skin
> files. The logic itself (how to draw a listing) will be done in pure
> Python. And while it looks also scary to me, so does php and designers
> seem to be happy with that.

Hm.  If all you need is some simple "if" statements, what is the
advantage Kid provides over any of the other dozens of Python templating
systems (XML based or not)?  Kid is pretty ambitious and seems like
overkill in this case.  Also there are quite a few posts regarding
performance issues with Kid when rendering complex pages, but it may be
MythTV would never hit that level of complexity anyway.

Note that I don't *hate* Kid, at least no more than I hate other XML
markup systems.   My main goal in arguing this was to 1) suggest a
non-XML alternative  and 2) give you fair warning about the condition of
Kid.  Kid definitely has some "growing up" to do ;-)


> I'm open for suggestions. I need an easy way to describe skins and
> webpages. Both should be the same language and I don't have the time
> to develop a huge template module like Kid and far not enough time to
> design a language itself. Like in the posts shown before, I only need
> some 'if' statements inside the description language, so XML + Kid
> seems a good and fast way to do that.

Well, assuming then that XML is the way to go, I personally find the
Django templating system far more readable than Kid.  The same goes for
SimpleTAL.  Kid is an intentional merging of TAL, PHP, Smarty and a
couple other things.  There's more than one way to do it, none preferred
over the others.  I can see how this might make Kid quite powerful, in a
Mary Shelley sort of fashion, but for simple uses I'd stick with a
simpler (and cleaner) system rather than invite Frankenstein into the
village.

Also, note that Buffet makes it quite simple to choose any template
system you like and hook it into CherryPy, so the choices aren't limited
to what is advertised.  I wrote the TurboStan plugin in just a couple
hours.

That being said... this is your project, I'm just wasting your time with
my $0.02 =)  I just wanted to offer the "other view" before you
committed to something I personally find distasteful.


Regards,
Cliff



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