Re: [WebMacro-user] concurrency problem with #include as template

[Eric B. R. <eb...@tc...>]

On Feb 7, 2006, at 11:05 AM, Marc Palmer wrote:

> Actually not true. WM's whitespace handling is REALLY REALLY BAD.  
> I've used it in some propery production environments now with split  
> teams and it is hard to justify some of the behaviour, and  
> producing nicely formatted plain text is painful.

yeah, it's terrible.  We use WM for Java-code generation, SQL schema  
generation, and for HTML.  Ya gotta process the output with something  
like Jalopy or HTMLTidy to make readable output.

> I would be very happy for the whitespace to be improved BUT it  
> depends what Eric calls improvement :)

we'll see.  First I've gotta (re)familiarize myself with WM's  
parser.  It's pretty complex.

> Definitely. Perhaps this means branching the parser source into two  
> packages... o.w.parser and o.w.parser2 so that we can just specify  
> in the WM properties which to use :)

Yeah, of course.  we'd have o.w.parser and  
o.w.NewButSlightlyLessSuckyParser.

> I don't imagine Eric would propose such wreckage... although if you  
> make it "WM 3" then you might mitigate this to a degree...  
> especially if we could provide a script that would 100% reliably  
> alter existing templates to produce the same results with the new  
> parser.

Such a script would be nuts!  If I do come up with an improvement we  
can make it configurable.

> You know you have my agreement there :)
>
> WM's strengths are:
>
> * The introspection engine
> * The parser
> * The template rendering
>
> All the rest is basically bloat... existing template providers,  
> caching providers and tools separated out from the core and  
> reorganised a bit would make it a much more attractive package.

In order for this to happen someone actually has to do it.  Endre has  
been complaining about this for as far back as I can remember.  I'm  
not personally motivated to mess with this.  It might be bloat, but  
it doesn't get in my way.  The parser, on the other hand, does.

eric