[Analysis] Templates: The good, the bad, the ugly

[Christopher Hicks]

On Tue, 7 Dec 2004, J. Paul Reed wrote:
>>> Jake> Also frustrating is the fact that the template
>>> Jake> directives are basically another programming language to deal
>>> Jake> with and have no support for context colorization is most common
>>> Jake> editors (vim, emacs, etc).
>>>
>>> Just for info, there is a simple TT mode for emacs available, which
>>> google should find.
>>
>> There is also a syntax module for TT on Vim as well somewhere on
>> Sourceforge.  I know Google can find it. :)  Look for tt2.vim
>
> Neither of these responses really address the problem Jake is describing.

They were directly addressing the second part of his concern.  Jake was 
wrong when he said "and have no support for context colorization is most 
common editors".  But regarding the other concern:

> It's like saying "To help us, you have to learn French, because half of 
> our code is in French, but the other half is in English. Oh but don't 
> worry... here's a dictionary."

This is life in web development to some degree.  You've got HTML, some 
programming language (in our case Perl) and then a choice of templating 
systems to merge these things together.  What would you rather do, have 
all of the HTML generated in Perl?  Then you wouldn't get any syntax 
highlighting for the HTML.  We could invent yet another templating system. 
I'd love to see BZ migrate to something like Apache::ASP.  TT2 is one of 
the better templating systems for any language, but the syntax is just 
fugly.

-- 
</chris>

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