[Petal] Some Limitations of Petal

[Steve Purkis]

Hi all,

I've been working with Petal quite a bit recently.  While it does its 
job well most of the time, I've still come across some limitations I 
thought I should report.  Some of these are high-level issues I wasn't 
sure if I should report via rt.cpan.org, so I've decided to post them 
here:

1. Error message are frequently cryptic

Unless you're a coder, a stack-trace is not going to help you fix 
errors in your templates.  As users of WYSIWYG editors are target users 
of Petal (as documented), I see this as a grave functional bug.

Severity: high


2. You can't pass values back to the template processor.

I realize this is a documented limitation, but not being able to say 
things like:

	<input petal:attribute="checked foo/is_bar $baz;"/>

means the implementer has to jump through hoops to accomplish some 
basic tasks.

Severity: high, IMHO


3. You can't use hash keys with '.' separators, ie:

	<span petal:replace="/hash/some.key">...</span>

Severity: low


4. Semi-colons sometimes break 'ugly format' if statements.

This fails:
	<?if name="session/user/privileges/admin;"?> ...

This does not:
	<?if name="session/user/privileges/admin"?> ...

Severity: low


Hope this helps,
-Steve