Jeffrey P Shell follows up with more on Zope Page Templates:
Page Templates have a wonderfully clean syntax in the TAL/TALES combination. There are very few TAL attributes, and their operations and operational order are clearly defined. TALES eliminates much of DTML's guesswork by eliminating the whole "is it an expression? a literal? a name lookup?" game.
I should clarify my earlier comments about ZPT. What I do in Zope, nowadays, requires minimal to no design. I have therefore abandoned DTML almost entirely in favor of Python Scripts which are so much cleaner and more powerful. From script, I emit quoted chunks of HTML. This works fine for a simple and purely functional application.
Writes Jeffrey of DTML:
Its namespace stack is a powerful but often untamed beast, and its full of grotesque shortcuts and workarounds. Anyone who's seen _[_['sequence-item']] knows what I mean.
Yes. I finally decided to just say no to DTML. If and when I need to coordinate with heavily-designed pages, I'll certainly want to give ZPT a spin. It's just overkill for my needs right now.
Former URL: http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2002/05/25.html#a266