Re: Ideal tag syntax; what's your take on it?

Hi Daniel.

I forgot to answer this thread...

A little context:
Well, I've worked with JSP (and prior template engines) for a while. A few
years ago I started working at a company in which the "web masters, novice
PHP programmers who wrote the presentation layer of our application JEE,
were accustomed to using Velocity. At that time I already knew Velocity
because I had written some tools for source code generation. Unfortunately,
for some reason (?), I did not like to use Velocity to produce (X)HTML.
After some Googling, I found FreeMarker.

A cool feature (or side effect of syntax) of Velocity and FreeMarker was to
write a vm. or. ftl template, rename it to .html and "see" the result in a
browser, without using any kind of backend. That was very helpful when I was
writing templates for HTML emails. Off course, it won't work for any case.


One lesson I learned from Groovy (and also from FreeMarker): Make a terse
syntax. Keep the template readable by humans. Even using code completion, I
really hate to write <abc-def:xyz a="${q.getAbc().toString()}" b="true">
when I can write <xyz a=q.abc b=true>. I also hate XML ;-)
One lesson I learned from somewhere else: Make things easy for the IDEs.
Probably a contradiction :-)


2011/6/7 Daniel Dekany <[email protected]>

> Ignore backward compatibility for a moment. What would *you* prefer?
> Or if you have no idea, what aspects of the current syntax bothers you
> the most in every day work?
>
>
> A bit of mussing from me (if you care)... The most modern form of
> FreeMarker syntax is like this:
>
>  [#assign x = 1]
>  [#if something]...[/#if]
>  [@myDirective]...[/@myDirective]
>  [@myOtherDirective /]
>
> Despite that the documentation doesn't push thins syntax at all, it
> has become very popular. That tells something.
>
> My personal(?) problem with the current situation is that while FTL
> (FreeMarker Template Language) has lost a lot from its SGML-ishness
> (HTML-isness) during its history, it kept some of the not-so-good
> things from it. So I'm afraid we have ended up with a mix that's too
> far from the ideal. Let's see:
>
> How FTL is not SGML:
>
> - For starters, the attribute syntax was never like in SGML or XML.
>  This is the cause of the most frequent mistake, where people try to
>  write <@foo x="${x}" /> instead of <@foo x=x />
>
> - 2.3 introduced those odd prefixes, "#" and "@" (instead of using
>  XML-ish name-space prefixes). I don't mind this in itself, not at
>  all. It's just not SGML-ish.
>
> - And now it doesn't even use <...>, but [...].
>
> How FTL is still similar to SGML:
>
> - You have to add a "/" to each empty-directive tag ([@foo /]), but
>  you don't have to add anything if nested content follows
>  ([@foo]...). Isn't that anti-intuitive and often inconvenient?
>  Nothing but SGML has this strange upside-down logic (I think).
>
>  Also, to complicate things... there are those who are more equal
>  than others. For a built-in directive you can write something like
>  [#assign x = 1] instead of [#assign x = 1 /], since FreeMarker knows
>  if they can have nested content or not.
>
> - You don't have to put comma between named arguments. In SGML you
>  have to quote non-trivial attribute values, so it isn't an issue
>  there, but I don't think any sane modern *programming* language
>  would do this with named arguments. [@foo x = a + 1 y = b + 1] is
>  just horrible. Luckily, you can write [@foo x = a + 1, y = b + 1] in
>  FTL, but you don't have to. (As a side note, we also have
>  ambiguities because of this: <@foo x = a! y = 2> will be parsed as
>  <@foo x = a!(y == 2)>. Yeah, part of this is that FTL allows "="
>  instead of "==". That was a mistake too...)
>
> --
> Best regards,
>  Daniel Dekany
>
>
>
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