One of the addition benefits of Template (beyond what merlyn said),
There is nothing that
merlyn listed in his post that
shows an advantage of
Template over
HTML::Template. He did place it on
equal ground but did not state any features it held that
HTML::Template did not.
is that Template is language neutral,
and as WAP-enabled sites become more common, using Template over HTML::Template may become
beneficial, since all you need to do for delieving WAP vs HTML is change the template file; you should not
have to touch any perl code save to point the Template processor to the right place. And then adding
text-only becomes simplier as well.
Your point about easily changing the display method from HTML
to something else is well-taken as an advantage of
Template
It was a key point in
davorg's
article
which I found on his website and which seems to have
vaporized from
perl.com
However, consider this part of your statement:
you should not
have to touch any perl code save to point the Template processor to the right place.
But the obvious question is: you will have to change the
display code, right? How would one change all the
HTML tags to the formatting conventions of another format? Ie,
plain text, XML, HTML, or WAP? One way would be to code in
"Template HTML" so that you could transform all the tags at once,
ie:
[% H1 %] This is a header
[% OL %]
[% LI %] we can make an HTML file if we want,
[% LI %] but we could make some thing else
[% LI %] just as easy.
[% OL %]
This is just brainstorming. I don't have a full answer.