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From: Glen Ezkovich <glen@hard-bop.com>
Subject: Re: [RT] do me a favor, don't call them taglibs 
Date: Sat, 4 Dec 2004 13:17:04 -0600
To: dev@cocoon.apache.org


On Dec 3, 2004, at 3:33 PM, Ralph Goers wrote:

> Glen Ezkovich said:
>>
>> On Dec 3, 2004, at 2:50 PM, Stefano Mazzocchi wrote:
>>
>>> All I ask from a template language:
>>>
>>>  1) something that HTML designers can edit with Dreamweaver
>>
>> Why? I really don't want HTML designers touching my templates. I want
>> them to work withe the data received from my generator and transform
>> that into something renderable by a browser.
>
> Wow. I guess we really have a different point of view.  I see 
> templates as
> an alternative to XSLT to generate the HTML.  Of course I would want an
> HTML designer to be able to do that.

I did too. Just wound up with the same old problem, mixed concerns. 
Each template had to be maintained as the site's visual style evolved. 
As much as we tried to use CSS, we still had to modify the HTML. Divs 
here, tables there, the ice was all around.  :-)

While I can see using a template to directly generate the HTML it makes 
each page layout a separate maintenance issue. That is, some changes to 
a sites design might require each template to be modified. Using XSLT, 
it might be possible to change just a single XSL  template. Think of 
something as simple as changing the image used as a bullet in a bullet 
list, or placing adds between paragraphs instead of all in the left 
column.

As usual, what you choose to do depends on what you anticipate the 
needs of your site to be. If I needed to nothing more then take a 
result set and display it in a table, I probably would just generate 
the table in the template. The more complex the page becomes the less 
likely I am to use HTML in the template.

What I've tried to do is define common entities that are rendered the 
same across various layouts and to define general page layout 
components that can be reused. By entities I  mean things like 
products, product lines, features, feature, article, paragraph, etc.. 
These are generally given an XML representation using JXTG and are in 
turn rendered by XSLT. By general page layout components I mean rows, 
columns, grids, bullet lists, images, etc.. These are defined in a 
style sheet.  A product can be laid out the same wether it is on a page 
by it's self or part of a catalog page. The difference might only be in 
the styles applied and/or the layout component that contains it. HTML 
element wise, the two renderings are identical, but visually maybe very 
different. Sometimes we do have to have use modes to render entities 
differently, but I generally consider these cases a failure of 
imagination. What is nice about this, is that the same template that 
generates XML data for a product on one site can be used with no or 
slight modification on another. The XSL defined layout components can 
be reused as well. The only things that need changing are the CSSs and 
some of the XSL templates for the entities.

The aim is to be able to have a data/content driven model of a website 
as well as a page driven model.  I'm not quite where I want to be yet. 
But I'm working on it. I still need to flesh out the concept a bit more 
and I need more sites to experiment on. Shhhhhh... Don't tell my 
clients. ;-) (this a private secure list... right?)

Glen Ezkovich
HardBop Consulting
glen at hard-bop.com
http://www.hard-bop.com


A Proverb for Paranoids:
"If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to 
worry about answers."
- Thomas Pynchon Gravity's Rainbow