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

[Vladimir O. <VO...@ci...>]

Well, it was just an opinion... As much as I agree with what you said
(about industrial mass winning over sanity, etc), it won't change the
state of things - people do tend to do new things using 'old' ways until
some threshold of 'inconvenience' is reached, after which they _might_
consider doing the same thing differently. Human body is not perfect,
nevertheless the evolution made it what it is. (I've just read an
article in a medicine magazine - scientists in the UK were offered to
'redesign' human body as they think would be the best, ie, eliminate
inherited inefficiencies, etc'. Among other things they ended up putting
male genitals under the armpits, as well as making them 'removable'...)

Anyways, the thing is in most cases the best adoption of new
ideas/technologies happen when the ideas rely to what existed before, so
that the transition period is not that painful.

Vlad

-----Original Message-----
From: fre...@li...
[mailto:fre...@li...] On Behalf Of
Daniel Dekany
Sent: Wednesday, June 28, 2006 1:16 PM
To: list for dicussing freemarker usage
Subject: Re: [FreeMarker-user] Real XML-Directives instead of those
pseudo<# or[#

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=20
> be a ticket for FM into the enterprise environment (through well=20
> 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=20
> the format everyone is so used to. After getting familiar with XML=20
> constructs, some people might choose to move to a less verbose
'native'
> FM syntax.
>
> Also, having something familiar to start with AND giving intermediate=20
> to advanced GUI designers possibility to create templates just by=20
> 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


Using Tomcat but need to do more? Need to support web services,
security?
Get stuff done quickly with pre-integrated technology to make your job
easier
Download IBM WebSphere Application Server v.1.0.1 based on Apache
Geronimo
http://sel.as-us.falkag.net/sel?cmd=3Dlnk&kid=3D120709&bid=3D263057&dat=3D=
121642
_______________________________________________
FreeMarker-user mailing list
Fre...@li...
https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freemarker-user