Re: Looking for HTML templating system

> >> Templates are templates, there should be no logic
> >> in them; they are only presentation.
> >
> >Presentation DEFINITELY needs logic, for anything beyond the 
> >stupidest "put a variable on a page" website.
> >
> >The differences is that a templating system should only have
> >PRESENTATION LOGIC, but no business-logic.
> >
> >The presentation having logic is a big part of making an 
> >easy-to-use responsive website!
> >
> >For example, my site is http://www.cdbaby.com
> >
> >The presentation/display is constantly changing based on the
> >contents.  It is deciding how it wants to present the business
> >information given to it.
> >
> >If an item is on sale, the designer has decided to put a big
> >yellow flag in the top-right corner.  If it is one hour until
> >we close, the designer has decided to change the color of the
> >page to let the customer know we're almost closing, and they
> >should hurry.  The designer has decided to capitalize the
> >artist names, and lowercase the album titles.
> >
> >All of this is presentation logic.
> 
> I'd take some issue with this. Sort of. The colour of the flag is (should
> be) in the realms of the designer, but the fact that it changes is in the
> realms of the business - "closing" is a concept rooted in your business, not
> in your web frontend. The "1 hour" rule is also a piece of business logic. 
> 
> The line is softly drawn in wet sand on a very wet beach in between waves -
> but I don't think there is a lot of "presentation logic" that is not
> governed by business rules. So very little logic should exist on the
> presentation side of templates.



I guess from my experience I feel that the business-logic is the code that
generates the attributes and such, ready to pass off to the template as
strings, hashes, and arrays.

But once you give that information to the template, it's up to the template
to decide what to do with it.

Here's a better example:

For any item you put in your shopping cart, my business-programming can
give you a list of 20 items for "If you like this you will like..."

But it's up to the visual design to decide how many of those 20 items
to show on the screen at once.   Maybe for beauty or usability, the designer
only wants 3.  So to do that, she would need "length" and "each" or "times"
methods.

Seems to me, template logic could do a lot with just:
- if / else 
- each / times
- length
- basic string formatting

But if you're going to write a whole new mini-language to reduce Ruby
(or any language) down to these few options, why bother?  Same amount of
time to teach your designers a mini-language as to just teach them the
same few methods in Ruby, but using real Ruby instead of some invented
subset.  But much less useful to have a subset instead of just Ruby. 


Sorry to be discussing this on the Ruby list, but I'm seriously considering
rewriting cdbaby.com in Ruby, and have been thinking about this template
issue a LOT lately.   So to me, it really is tied in with Ruby itself.