Hi Frank, The issue came up when me and Allessandro were trying to fix a bug and figure out why stuff was escaped weirdly which causes special characters to not render properly. Apart from this I think it is important for enterprise customers, since this would help greatly in making the software more secure. I don't want to press this too much though since the 4.5 release is around the corner I just think that this will become an important topic when we try to improve the code quality and security.
Bernhard Posselt On 10/09/2012 04:42 PM, Frank Karlitschek wrote: > Guys, > > > templating is our smallest problem at the moment. > Out current templating is not fancy but works fine. I´m against replacing it > with something that generates a huge amount of new work and introduced new > bugs and performance problems instead of working on topics that are important > for our users like bugs and feature requests on bugs.owncloud.com > > > Frank > > > On 09.10.2012, at 16:26, Bernhard Posselt <[email protected]> wrote: > >> Hi Viktor, >> >> Yeah, HAML is great :) >> >> Could you provide a link to your templating engine, I dont find any >> information on that on Google. Or do you mean PHP in general (phtml as >> in the extension)? >> >> >> On 10/09/2012 04:20 PM, Victor Dubiniuk wrote: >>> Hi Bernhard, >>> >>> I have a long experience with Smarty and tried a couple of other template >>> engines. Most of them is nothing but PHP written in PHP. >>> There are some brilliant exclusions like Slim and Haml in Ruby but both are >>> not implemented in PHP completely. >>> I consider phtml to be the best option for templates. One can say it is >>> weird for designers but any other non-HTML syntax is weird for designers >>> either. >>> It's just my humble opinion. :) >>> >>> --- >>> Victor >>> >>> On Tue, Oct 9, 2012 at 5:06 PM, Bernhard Posselt >>> <[email protected]>wrote: >>> >>>> Hi guys, >>>> >>>> I've ran into multiple problems with the current template engine setup. >>>> >>>> * Lack of documenation: >>>> Since these are only used by Owncloud, we have to maintain the >>>> documentation on the template engine. Using a third party engine would >>>> simplify documentation since we only would have to document how this is >>>> built into Owncloud. Not to mention that there isnt actually any >>>> documentation about the current templating engine at all from what Ive >>>> found (http://api.owncloud.org/classes/OCP.Template.html) >>>> >>>> * Lack of template inheritance: >>>> Currently we can only organize templates by splitting them into >>>> different parts and including them in a Top-Down like fashion. Template >>>> inheritance solves this kinds of problems (an example: >>>> >>>> https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/topics/templates/#template-inheritance >>>> ) >>>> >>>> * Weird and unsafe XSS escaping: >>>> Most important topic for me. We currently escape values when they're >>>> assigned to a template like $tpl->assign('var', $var). If you dont want >>>> to invoke the XSS protection on the variable, you use >>>> $tpl->assign('var', $var, false) which is really weird and non obvious. >>>> Also: What do we escape? IIRC variables and arrays, but what about >>>> objects? We at the news app pass an array with objects to the template >>>> layer. Are the properties escaped? If they are, this could lead to >>>> potential weird behaviour, not to speak of the performance impact >>>> (reflection). As you see, theres no sane way to do XSS escaping when >>>> passing values to the template layer. >>>> >>>> The solution? Easy: escape the values when they are printed to the >>>> template. Most template engines forbid you to use PHP in the templates >>>> (which is a good decision) and provide their own print statements like >>>> Django's {{ variable }} or Rail's <%= variable %>. All printed values >>>> are automatically escaped by default! If you want to prevent escaping >>>> you just use a filter like {{ var|safe }}. The word safe alone gets me >>>> thinking: why is it called safe? What are the risks? >>>> >>>> * Allowing PHP code in templates: >>>> This is not only a security problem stated by the previous point, but >>>> also an invitation to code mess. Allowing PHP code in the template >>>> tempts people to disregard the MVC principles (like for instance doing >>>> database queries in the templates, we have that problem too, I admit), >>>> which makes your templates really inflexible and really hard to change. >>>> Everytime I try to clean up our templates or adjust them, I give up in >>>> frustration because I'd have to adjust all templates, some of which are >>>> generated in a recursive way and thus also very complicated to understand. >>>> >>>> Coming from Django I've looked at two similar engines: >>>> >>>> http://www.h2o-template.org/ >>>> http://twig.sensiolabs.org/ >>>> >>>> Both have good documentation, Twig doesnt do autoescaping but theres a >>>> block for that. I'm curious about other suggestions, and it would also >>>> be fine if they could be reviewed from a security context. >>>> >>>> PS: Sorry for the long post, here's a potato >>>> http://efr0702.files.wordpress.com/2012/03/potato-b.jpg >>>> >>>> Cheers >>>> >>>> Bernhard Posselt >>>> >>>> _______________________________________________ >>>> Owncloud mailing list >>>> [email protected] >>>> https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/owncloud >>>> >> _______________________________________________ >> Owncloud mailing list >> [email protected] >> https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/owncloud > _______________________________________________ Owncloud mailing list [email protected] https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/owncloud
