[Templates] tt annoyances

[Eric Siegerman]

On Fri, Oct 10, 2003 at 01:49:00PM -0500, David Dyer-Bennet wrote:
> [...] I think I actually want *the same*
> programming environment for each, really; I think what I really want
> is for the distinction between "form" and "content" to be a completely
> human-decided distinction.

I have to disagree here.  If I wanted that, I'd write pages in
straight Perl -- factored to separate business logic from
presentation, of course, but both halves done in the same
language.

What brought me to TT in the first place was the customer's
requirement: "no programming in the templates!"  We've snuck a
little in -- simple "foreach"s for presenting lists, and an "if"
or two -- and the customer has adapted well.  But if I'd tried to
tell them to deal with Perl's "$", "@", "%" prefixes, and the
difference between hash members and object methods, and all that
"programming stuff", it would have been a complete non-starter.
That TT abstracts all of that away, letting me deal with it so
that the template writer doesn't have to, is for me the whole
point.

Sure, I could make great use of a richer templating environment
-- but then I'm a computer geek.  If the cost of that richness is
making TT useless to non-programmers, I'd *much* rather live
without it.

--

|  | /\
|-_|/  >   Eric Siegerman, Toronto, Ont.        erics@telepres.com
|  |  /
When I came back around from the dark side, there in front of me would
be the landing area where the crew was, and the Earth, all in the view
of my window. I couldn't help but think that there in front of me was
all of humanity, except me.
	- Michael Collins, Apollo 11 Command Module Pilot