[thelist] Templating solutions?

[Marty Landman]

At 01:51 AM 12/30/01 +0200, Lauri Vain wrote:

>Oftentimes simply embedding the code into the HTML template does the trick.
>Othertimes the
><code>include("header.inc");</code>    and
><code>include("footer.inc");</code> works its magic.

Lauri,

I've found that a more generic solution has a template as its base with the 
common elements filled in by the program and other software entities. 
Taking an object oriented approach allows complexity to develop as needed 
w/o requiring the whole system to be rewritten. I'm developing 
http://feedthebulldog.com/ as an illustration of this using ASP & Visual Basic.

>There are, however, also moments when such approaches aren't enough and
>something else is required.

Nesting is a good technique especially when it empowers the author of the 
site rather than the developer, i.e. as the programmer of the back-end it's 
important to provide the webmaster with tools that will allow for needs 
they have which you may not be able to properly anticipate. For instance in 
my CMS/Authoring product SIMPL there is in addition to a site wide template 
a facility called 'heaps' which allows for content independance from HTML 
tagging.

For example on http://newdiets.com/ there are well over 100 recipes. Most 
of them use a recipe heap, where the tagging and symbolic content 
substitution is specied. Heap instances are used to specify the contents of 
individual pages on the site and the tagging is done according to the 
specifications of the heap at runtime. Which means that the corn bread 
recipe on http://newdiets.com/Breads_and_Such/Corn_Bread.shtml can be 
changed from italics to bold on the line between the title and ingredients 
by changing the recipe heap.

**Changing the recipe heap will make this change instantly to every such 
line on the site, at least all the ones that use the recipe heap.

hth,

Marty

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