Here's the problem I have with the templating systems. They're fine if you want to remove simple HTML from simple perl, but if you have a very complex HTML display (ie. things get printed several different ways depending on the data you have or don't have) or you have a lot of data, you end up with either a lot of data being stored in memory before it's sent off to the template or you end up with really complicated templates that are no easier to manage than their perl counterparts, and are even more confusing to the graphical designers who work on them.

Let's take, for example, a database pull that prints out entries grouped by day. Let's say we do this for a month, and there's a fairly good number of entries. If you're using DBI, all you have to do is just loop over your rows, printing out the data and, if you've come upon a new day, possibly a date header. However, with templates, you can't do this. You have to read all the data in, process it into its day and entry groups, and then pass it off to the template.

What would make life a whole lot easier is if I could move all my HTML strings out into one file where the strings are named or identified somehow, then print those named (and processed, if they contain variable subs) strings. Then I remove the HTML from my script without losing any of the very clean, efficient functionality of my processing.

Does anyone know of any modules that do that? It's not really a 'template', so to speak, but a connection of named lines.

In reply to Re: Re: Effective ways to 'write' html. by Hrunting
in thread Effective ways to 'write' html. by zigster

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