Call me nuts, but ...

<rant mode="philosophical">

Quoting Geert Bevin:
> 
> I'm writing my presentation about RIFE for TSSJS, and I just *know*  
> that many people in the audience will shriek when they see the  
> template syntax for the first time.

Every framework tries to wire together classes and presentation 
and a URL sitemap and so on and so forth, and this simply cannot 
be done clearly and consistently with this language at this point 
in time.  I suspect the sad fact is that in EVERY framework there 
is a single point of logical inconsistency where all the ugliness 
accumulates, just like a hairball.  Or perhaps an abstract class 
that implements interface hairball  :-) 

In Rife it's in the templates, but (as has been mentioned previ-
ously in this thread) the syntax is HTML editor -friendly, and 
the functionality is logicless and bidirectional, so the syntax 
has its upside.  And it also means that as compensation, the 
declarations of submissions and the usage of templates are 
relatively painless and straightforward to understand.  

In other frameworks the dead bodies (or, "gotchas") are more 
deeply buried, or the appealing simplicity breaks down much 
more drastically at a more painful point in the framework.  
This seems to be the focus of the Java-v-Ruby debate right 
now.  It's like learning a foreign language.  Each language 
has its point where suddenly the bloom is off the rose and 
oh crap! now you feel like you are pounding nails into your 
head.  For example, I've read that with spanish the first two
years are smooth sailing but the third year is the killer. 
With english the first year is a total breeze ("Grammar?  
WHAT grammar?!") but there's a pretty nasty brick wall 
somewhere around the next corner. 

Rife's template syntax is ugly because the (inevitable) seams
in the framework pop up in the presentation-layer markup. But 
OTOH you could troll the mailing lists of other frameworks to 
find out where _they_ bury _their_ dead bodies.

</rant>


HTH!  :)

fred

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