[Petal] Interoperability

[William McKee]

Hi Jim and Jean-Michel,

I've been following up on your conversation this morning and am glad to see some 
progress being made towards interoperability. I think it would be a good thing.

A few points:

- the petal:if syntax is good for busy people as well as lazy people <g>.

- Petal allows one to access values in arrays or hashes via the object.value format. 
I'm guessing that Jean-Michel considers this a method which returns a value and is 
why he did not mention it in his original message.

- The concept of TALES expressions seems like it would be an interesting way to 
implement the Petal syntax that extends beyond the TAL spec. Unless, TALES 
becomes a defacto standard for building templates for web applications, I'm not 
sure what the benefits would be of doing this work. 

- I must agree about the dot notation. I cannot see where an application would need 
to have a variable name with a dot in it. If I'm accepting user input, it will usu. go 
into a variable that I have named. Backslashing special characters makes sense in 
the exceptional cases.

- The debate about using Perl/Python/Java/etc. in templates vs. creating a mini-
language will never end. I've tried many Perl template implementations. Personally, 
I prefer a mini-language to embedding code into templates. However, I think the 
mini-language should truly be mini which is the reason I'm not using the Template 
Toolkit <www.tt2.org>. I think the Petal attribute language is simple and like the 
ability to apply minor modification to the values from the template side.


- What is the Object Constraint Language? That sounds like a possibility.

-> I find the string: expressions very interesting!
Jean-Michel: This sounds like it might do what I was asking about last week in 
regards to creating a mailto link. What do you think?



Regards,
William
-- 
 Lead Developer
 Knowmad Services Inc. || Internet Applications & Database Integration
 http://www.knowmad.com