From: avi@...4.com (Avi Bryant)
Date: 2004-07-27T01:51:51+09:00
Subject: Re: rubyonrails and cgikit comparison

Florian Weber <csshsh@structbench.com> wrote in message news:<34E7BB04-DE6B-11D8-8F52-000A95BD142E@structbench.com>...
> > That's just the point we disagree on. I don't think we should have
> > real programming in the template(like references to variables), some 
> > basic logic only. In short, I like the presence of the binding, you 
> > don't. That's ok with me ;-)
> 
> why shouldnt we have a real programming language in the template?
> 
> what if the presentation logic in our template is very very complicated?

To introduce a further heresy: why restrict the use of the real
programming language to logic (conditions, loops, etc)?  Wouldn't it
be nice to use a real programming language, with real abstraction, for
the rest of the template too, instead of a just markup language?  A
lot of problems simply go away if you use Ruby to generate the HTML
directly rather than messing around with templates, bindings, and
embedded code.

Of course, you still need to separate presentation from content - but
these days, HTML isn't supposed to be presentational, it's supposed to
be semantic.  HTML *is* content, and as such should be firmly under
the control of the developer.  The correct way of doing presentation
is through CSS, and the necessary indirections are already built in to
the CSS/HTML interaction so that you don't need templating at all. 
This makes it a natural developer/designer boundary - just agree on
the CSS classes and ids, and work on your separate files.

For more in this vein, see
http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/userblogs/avi/blogView?showComments=true&entry=3257728961
..

Avi