I know this is not comme-il-faut, but I have increasingly come to detest templating toolkits myself. If you can get your HTML-monkeys to maintain your templates for you, they're probably great. However, I suspect this is quite often a red herring. At least of I the projects I do involving web stuff only a very few come with ready-to-use HTML-monkeys at my beck and call. And if I still have to maintain my templates myself, why, oh why, should I maintain them in the unholy format that is HTML? And passing data to a templating toolkit -- don't get me started. You either adjust your wonderful controller code the the templating toolkits idea of control and data structures with a sledgehammer, or you (shudder) embed Perl code in your HTML templates.

(I detest CGI.pm, too, it's not just templating toolkits. It's one of the things I'm good at. Detesting.)

Lately, I've started to tinker with doing HTML in Perl. It's rather fun, actually. I do thinks like: 

body {
  div {
    { class => 'content' },

    q{Text content},
    table {
      { width => '100%' },

      row {
        cell {
          ...
        },
        cell {
          ...
        }
      }
    }
  }
}

[download]
While I can still separate controller and view, now I'm able to code my view in a sensible syntax, and I can pass stuff back and forth without feeling cuffed and gagged. This is still an experiment, so I'm not sure if it's really a good idea, but it's refreshing.

(Ok, so this doesn't really answer your question at all. Sice the templating guys are bound to do so though, I just thought I'd share. Sorry.)

In reply to Re: HTML::Template vs. CGI.pm by argggh
in thread HTML::Template vs. CGI.pm by hacker

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