January 23rd, 2008 by Mark Ramm
I’ve enjoyed hanging out with Adrian at the last couple of PyCon’s, and I’ve been looking forward to his new venture EveryBlock.com for a while.
It seems like the buzzword of our times is:
think globally, and act locally.
But it sure seems to me that you can’t act effectively at the local level unless you understand what’s happening in your neighborhood. And most of the time we don’t know a thing about anything local, because it’s not a big enough market to for the increasingly corporate mass-media driven news outlets.
But, at least in theory, the web should change that. It should provide us with the ability to find truly local information. And that’s what everyblock is all about.
Earlier this summer Adrian released a very cool tool for parsing content that was likely built from some kind of template (eg, dynamically generated e-mails, or web pages). I’ve been using TemplteMaker for about a month on a little side project, I immediately saw how this fit into the EveryBlock master plan.
Anyway, congratulations Adrian! And if you live in Chicago, New York, or San Francisco, check it out.
January 23rd, 2008 by Mark Ramm
TurboGears and Django both call their template languages “designer friendly” — but they are not saying the same thing..
Django’s templates are not particularly Dreamweaver (or other WSYWIG editor friendly), and Genshi (like it’s older brother Kid) isn’t designed to be particularly easy for graphic designers to learn.
As far as designer-friendliness goes, I think it all comes down to workflow, and what you expect designers to do. If your designers work in Dreamweaver, and want to be able to look at the template files there, Kid/Genshi’s attribute based markup language will be the most likely to hold up to changes they make. But, if you work with with the same designers over time, and you have designers use text-editors to edit HTML and CSS are willing to learn a few simple markup tricks, the Django template language starts to make a lot of sense.
The Genshi system works well with WSYWIG tools, and allows you to write your pages so that they preview well in Firefox and IE — without the need for a server. But, it’s also less likely that designers will want to learn how Genshi works (don’t get me wrong, I know lots of designers who know Genshi, I just expect that the Django people are right in arguing that their template system is more accessible to non-programmers). So, you’re likely to have more programmer involvement after the designer does his/her work if you use Genshi.
But it is worth mentioning that modern CSS based layouts actually make it much, much easier for programmers and designers to work together without trudging all over one another’s HTML. This means that good design means that look-and-feel changes can often (but not always) made without ever touching the template. This change actually makes a lot more difference in “designer friendliness” than which template language you choose.
Of course there’s more to template languages than “designer friendliness,” and the differences between TurboGears and Django become more apparent there. Topics that should probably be discussed at some point are: cross-site-scripting attacks and HTML/XML auto-escaping systems, the value of template-sandboxing vs trusting your template designers, and the need to produce lots of different kinds of XML (RSS, Atom, etc) and how template languages fit in. Oh, and I should probably talk about performance issues too. But, that’s way too many hot-button issues for one day.
So, I’ll leave those controversies for later. ;)