[Petal] Interoperability

[Jean-Michel Hiver]

> - 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. 

Well, me neither... On the other hand, complying with TALES would help
it to become a de facto standard... I'll see what I can do :-)


> - 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.

I think so, and thanks to Perl's "look behind zero width assersions"
regular expressions, it should not be too difficult to implement either.
Again, I'll see what I can do.


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

I just found the documentation here:
http://www.omg.org/cgi-bin/doc?formal/01-09-77

I don't really like it... It's big (50 pages), uses '<' and '>' which
would need to be encoded, and it would be a bigger project than Petal
itself plenty of work.


> -> 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?

Definitely. I'll also change the :modifier syntax to modifier: as it's
an obvious, natural way to get closer to TALES. After all, to be TALES
compliant I need only the following:

path:
string:
not:

I think I can handle that, and it'll be a good first step...

Cheers,
-- 
IT'S TIME FOR A DIFFERENT KIND OF WEB
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