I've done a fair amount of work with Petal recently on the MKDoc project. In general it's a pretty neat system, but it does suffer from some signficant drawbacks:

• Terrible error messages. If something goes wrong you're pretty much left on your own to figure out what it was.
• XML was never meant to be edited by hand, a fact that will become painfully obvious if you try to edit your templates in a normal text editor!
• It's quite slow. I've seen cases where relatively simple templates take several seconds to process for no obvious reason.

-sam

PS: Of course, no discusssion of templating would be complete without a pointer to the article on the subject, Choosing a Templating System by our own perrin! Ignore it at your own risk.

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