From: James Britt <jamesUNDERBARb@...>
Date: 2004-07-26T08:35:00+09:00
Subject: Re: rubyonrails and cgikit comparison

Florian Weber wrote:
> 
>> As for your example - I hope you realize the example is awkward itself
>> :) No matter which framework you choose, the solution will always be
>> complicated and ugly. And yes, you can do this in cgikit :)
> 
> 
> not really.
> 
> <a href="foo" style="color: <%= (@some_stuff > 3) ? 'red' : 'black' 
> %>">foo</a>
> 
> how would you do this in xml?

Replace the stuff that makes XML parsers unhappy.

<a href="foo"
    style="color: &lt;%= (@some_stuff &gt; 3) ?
      'red' : 'black' %&gt; " >foo</a>


It's fugly, though most templating formats have that problem anyway.

Most of them force a mix of disharmonious markup: not XML, not HTML, not 
anything consistent with the document markup.  If your main focus is on 
the (X)HTML, and you try to use a fairly conventional HTML or XML 
editor, the <%template sqiggles%> just get in the way.

In the above example, since the XML is just a way of structuring
the data (i.e., there are no elements that have special meaning to some 
other process, other than a web browser), one could do this

<?EXP (@some_stuff > 3) ? 'red' : 'black' ?>
<a href="foo"  style="color: EXP  " >foo</a>

on the assumption that some process knows that when it find a PI, it 
replaces that next occurence of the PI target (here 'EXP') with the 
eval'ed results of the PI data.

It makes it a bit more friendly to designers and editing tools.

My particular preference for templating tools is something that lets me 
check the validity of code and markup independent of each other 
(knowing, of course, that the combined results must also at some point 
be checked).  I'd rather not have to "compile" a page each time I want 
to verify that HTML attributes are properly quoted, or that there are no 
syntax errors in the code.

James