Smooth Development with Zope Page Templates
By Amos Latteier
Thinking about a new templating system for your Web site? How about one that actually fosters collaboration between designers and programmers, instead of hindering it?
Most templating systems such as ASP, JSP, and PHP use special tags or entities to indicate dynamic content. Templating tags create problems. For instance, these special tags can turn your template into invalid HTML, which often upsets HTML editing tools. Your editing tools might not let you easily edit special tags, or worse, they might change or delete unrecognized tags.
In addition, templating tags may not display correctly in Web browsers during the testing phase, and may also preclude you from including dummy content in your template. This problem limits your ability to develop and change templates without first connecting them to a working application, and may require ongoing assistance from a programmer or administrator. Collectively, these problems slow you down and restrict your ability to develop application templates as quickly and easily as you can develop static HTML pages.
Introducing Zope Page Templates
Zope Page Templates (ZPT) represents a different approach to templating. It provides a practical way to build a presentation layer for Web applications, while allowing HTML designers and programmers to work together in the development process.
Rather than providing special tags for templating, ZPT adds attributes to existing tags, similarly to how CSS decorates HTML pages.
