At 18:53 12/11/1999 -0500, Rasmus Lerdorf wrote:
>You know, PHP was once just a templating system. I had special tags that
>I replaced with the output from the business logic I wrote in C in
>order to avoid needing to recompile my code just to tweak the
>HTML. Then I figured it would be a good idea to add stuff like
>IF/LOOPS/etc so I could manipulate my tags a little bit.
>
>Now, 5 years later, people are writing template systems that sit on top of
>PHP because they are writing business logic in PHP which means yet another
>template system is needed to separate code from layout.
Interesting anecdote :-)
>I wonder how many layers of templates we will have 5 years from now.
>
>It's a slippery slope...
Well, right now I am writing a templating system (well it's more of an
XML/XHTML/HTML + XSL/CSS system, but still...) that is meant to publish
static pages in various ways (one of the main goals is to separate layout
from structure using simple and mostly CSS rules while still being able to
send the HTML to browsers that don't understand CSS), but especially so
that "live" components of any kind (SSI, Mason, ::ASP, Embperl, whatever)
can be embedded easily in the output. And it has hooks so that the original
template doesn't have to be a file but can be pretty much anything,
including Perl code returning a template (the said Perl code is of course
free to use a templating system, and it is likely that it will).
That means templates generating templates, possibly including other
templates (at least). Hmmm.
.Robin
"What I like about deadlines is the lovely whooshing sound they make as
they rush past." --Douglas Adams
