Re: [FreeMarker-user] Real XML-Directives instead of those pseudo <# or[#

[Daniel D. <dd...@fr...>]

Wednesday, June 28, 2006, 4:54:06 PM, Vladimir Olenin wrote:

> Personally, I'd vote for 'Freemarker XML' format with both my hands!

Because then you couldn't be able to type? Good idea... ;->

> Even if it'd have somewhat limited functionality. I'd say this might be
> a ticket for FM into the enterprise environment (through well supported
> XML editors and basically free autocompletion features based on the
> DTDs).

Certainly. OTOH it will totally kill the hope that anybody will ever
write stuff (IDE plugins and like) that handles native FTL. XML is
just fall short technically, and the only reason to support it is that
XML is buzzword and thus everybody wants it and everybody supports it.
Even if it happens to be ugly in the concrete use-case. Because, it is
(managers are reaching into their underpants): XML! So, not that it
depends (only) on me, but it's kind of painful for me. The industrial
mass wins over sanity again... Like, with a exaggerated simile, when
will Java Language use XML syntax? Or Python? Why didn't they chosen
that, if there was plenty of XML editors around already?

> Yes, it will be more verbose, but this will give people a choice and the
> format everyone is so used to. After getting familiar with XML
> constructs, some people might choose to move to a less verbose 'native'
> FM syntax.
>
> Also, having something familiar to start with AND giving intermediate to
> advanced GUI designers possibility to create templates just by using
> their XML editors would be a HUGE win. That's at least what I think :).

You know I have no problem with XML, it's good thing, but it's too
often used improperly nowadays. Mostly it should be an internal format
for programs, but since it's not utterly hard to edit it as plain
text, people tend to be lazy to provide anything over that. For
example as far as we are talking about document and Web page
development, it should not be ever edited on the level where you see
the angle-brackets and like. Still, not so long ago almost everybody
has edited DocBook and XDocBook with emacs and like (I'm just writing
an XDocBook documentation with XXE... what a relief after JEdit!), and
there is still no WYSIWYM DocBook editor that I could call even
semi-serious. OK, maybe there is ArborText, but who on the earth can
buy that, or have seen that in life anyway? Now, if dynamic XML
documents should be editable visually, I would happily drop any other
template language syntax, because after all, the template authors
don't see the template language. But this is not the case. It's
actually *very* hard to show/edit any serious dynamism with
WYSIWYM-style editor. And after plain simple static XDocBook editing
is problem nowadays, you can imagine...

> Vlad

-- 
Best regards,
 Daniel Dekany