> I've been considering using a template system for an app that I'm > working, but decided against it as the designers who would be putting > the actual pages together (look n feel) use Adobe GoLive which does > 'bad things' to non-html stuff (at least in my experience).
I know everybody's defending their fave templating system... I guess I can't resist: I have to jump in and defend my baby :) So why is Petal better than anything else? First of all, it is an implementation of TAL. TAL is a very clever open specification for WYSIWYG-friendly templates written by the Zope people. TAL has three python implementations, one PHP implementation and two Perl implementations (see Petal::CodePerl). I believe it will become the standard with which template designers will want to work with. You can open Petal XHTML templates into GoLive, Dreamweaver, Mozilla, and they will look fine. Petal is basically an implementation of TAL, an open specification designed by the ZOPE people to be WYSIWYG-compatible and which has been extensively tested with all kinds of WYSIWYG-ish software. Because Petal templates have to be well-formed XML, it is safe (and in fact recommended!) to send them through HTML tidy and check for well-formness with xmllint. Petal is not limited to XHTML. You can template any kind of XML. RSS, RDF, SVG, WML... you name it! It has good support for Unicode / multi-lingual applications and character set encoding (well, provided you use Perl 5.8). It is quite fast (templates are turned into subroutines which are cached on disk and in memory). It has been designed to be very mod_perl friendly. Petal has an active community and a mailing list, it is stable and has already been successfully used in different projects by different people. This TAL spec that I've shamelessly stolen / implemented is a really cool idea. You should really give it a try in between two Template Toolkit driven projects :) Cheers, -- Building a better web - http://www.mkdoc.com/ --------------------------------------------- Jean-Michel Hiver [EMAIL PROTECTED] - +44 (0)114 255 8097 Homepage: http://www.webmatrix.net/
