Re: [htmltmpl] enhancements to H::T

[Sam T. <sa...@tr...>]

On Tue, 9 Dec 2003, Mathew Robertson wrote:

> - TMPL_ELSIF tag, eg <TMPL_ELSIF somevar>

I've certainly had a lot of requests for this feature, but I'm still
reluctant to include it.  I think it would only enable people to build
even more complex logic into their templates, which is not generally a
good idea.

> - support for custom tags, eg <TMPL_CATGETS ...>

I'll be interested to see how you coded this.  I'm not sure the
current code base can support this cleanly...  And even though I put
it in my HTML::Template v3 design doc I'm still not sure it's a good
idea.  (Go figure)

> - trailing slash in tags, aka <TMPL... />

This is trivially done in a filter, so there's no reason to add it to
the core code.

> - TVPL_VAR support for HTML=TEXT which allows paragraphs of text to be formatted to respect newlines

This is easily done with HTML::Template::Expr and is too task-specific
to go in the core code.  I've done this task a few times and each time
I've done it a little differently (<br>&nbsp;<br> vs. <p>, wrapping
long lines vs. no wrap, etc.).

> - dot syntax, eg 'user.name'

Allowing dots in variable names seems harmless enough.

> - dot syntax with autovivification of leading template variable, eg 'user.name' results in autovivification of 'user'

I know you explained this to me earlier, but I still don't understand
the value of this feature.  So far HTML::Template hasn't cared what
you name your variables and I'm somewhat loathe to start now.

This is also something that's easily done with an overridden param()
in a sub-class.

> I have included documentation to support the enhancements.  Also, I
> have bumped the revision number to 2.7 so as to indicate a
> non-standard release.

Someday there will be an HTML::Template 2.7, so this isn't a good fake
revision number.  Something like 2.6_01 would be better.  That's the
standard CPAN notation for beta releases.

-sam