I covered a few people's attempts at this in my Choosing a Template System essay. My favorite example of this type is the now defunct HTML_Tree. It never really caught on. There have been other tries in Java, like XMLC. They also failed to gather a large following. Most people stayed with things like JSP and Velocity.

I think the reality is that DOM-based HTML manipulation gets cumbersome for complex templates. It also ties your code very tightly to the presentation. Manipulation based on HTML ID attributes works better, since the code no longer has to know as much about where they are. Petal and Template::TAL are XML-friendly but don't seem to offer more separation than Template Toolkit and the like, i.e. the XML they use is just another template language.

So, if you want to pursue this, I'd suggest moving away from the DOM-like approach in your example and going to something more like HTML_Tree, HTML::Seamstress, and XMLC.

In reply to Re: RFC - Template::Empty by perrin
in thread RFC - Template::Empty by redhotpenguin

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