Princepawn has come up with his own framework, Seamstress, though I'm not sure how serious he is about it

Thank you for your balanced assessment of templating systems. My first question would be: have you looked at the docs and philosophy behind HTML::Seamstress? Would you agree that Seamstress is a rather unique beast in the jungle HTML templating systems? The only thing similar to it is XML::LibXML, which is based on XHTML and hence requires better structured documents. It also is not based on HTML::Tree which means that you cannot get the magnificent table-building abilities of HTML::ElementExtended

Now on to your question about my seriousness.

• Seamstress originally contained HTML templating subroutines and support for preparing HTML documents for templating via a command-line tool. All subroutines for templating have been moved out to a separate tested and documented distribution, HTML::Element::Library. Seamstress is now simply compiler support for a large collection of generic tree manipulation routines, which includes HTML::Element::Library, HTML::ElementExtended and the root class HTML::Element (which is part of HTML::Tree).
• I recently developed a database-driven website in CGI::Prototype (merlyn'stool), Data::FormValidator, Class::DBI, and HTML::Seamstress. If you click on any page, at the bottom is a "View source" link which gives you an idea of how Seamstress works.

  I can report that I was pleased with my ability to create common look and feel by normal object-oriented programming as opposed to something like a Mason autohandler.

• I am very happy with my tool and responsive to input on it's improvement. It is not a popular tool. It was well-received at the Thousand Oaks Perl Mongers meeting recently. I meant to give a talk on DFV but they got interested in Seamstress so I explained how it worked and they liked it. That being said, HTML::Template and Template, Mason, Embperl are much more popular and have much longer track records in critical corporate situations. Using Seamstress is a commitment to improving it as you need it - much as I do.

HTML::Formvalidator

I think the most popular validation module is Data::FormValidator and I am happy with its performance. You might take a look at that.

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