Interesting philosophical exercise, I doubt it'll put much weight in
when trying to defend our templates to other people. It's easy to
state that frameworks might have several points of ugliness and that
the templates could just be one of them, indicating that a lot of
other things are 'as ugly'.
On 10-feb-06, at 23:46, Fred Baube wrote:
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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