[Zope] DTML or TAL

Jim Penny jpenny@universal-fasteners.com
Fri, 24 May 2002 11:37:30 -0400


On Fri, May 24, 2002 at 04:16:53PM +0100, Chris Withers wrote:
> Andy McKay wrote:
> > 
> > Oh give it a rest Chris. And we wonder why people get worried about DTML
> > going away. Its not. If it did Zope would fork, but its not.
> 
> History will tell ;-)
> 
> Sure, it'll be there for backwards compatability, but I will not "give it a rest" when it
> comes to trying to persuade new users to use something that may well persuade them not to
> use Zoep at all.
> 
> The number of people I've seen confused by DTML's idiosyncracies, confused namespace and
> excessive implicitness means that I'm not gonna just stand by while people do the
> equivalent of pointing someone wearing a blindfold towards the edge of a cliff...

Ah, but there are things in zope that can simply not be done, as far as
I know, with ZPT.

These things certainly includes ZSQL methods.  They probably include
places where you want to use the equivalent of dtml-with (although I
think that you could mostly use "Portable Holes" to do what I am using
this kind of stuff for).  And using ZPT in python products seems to be
not well documented, and may be problematic, see "Grrr for ZPT and
python product" on the zope mailing list.

While I believe that ZPT is superior to DTML, in ZPT's intended
realm, there can be no doubt that ZPT looks pretty unfamiliar to a
programmer who does not have an extensive XML background.

One of the things I need to get around to is writing some example code
showing alternate styles in simple tal.  I think that much of the Zope 
Book's example code will prove to be non-idiomatic.

Jim Penny

> 
> cheers,
> 
> Chris
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Zope maillist  -  Zope@zope.org
> http://lists.zope.org/mailman/listinfo/zope
> **   No cross posts or HTML encoding!  **
> (Related lists - 
>  http://lists.zope.org/mailman/listinfo/zope-announce
>  http://lists.zope.org/mailman/listinfo/zope-dev )
>