Objections to XSLT
XSLT was the obvious choice for bringing content and layout together but is it easy enough for most webmasters to understand?
I originally chose XSLT as the templating language for this project because:
- It’s there - why re-invent the wheel?
- It’s arguably the most well known standard
- It’s stable, tried and tested
Now I see that other CMS “hackers” have objected to XSLT due to it’s complexity* and most average webmasters don’t know enough about it to build a useful template… Good point. Once might solve it by providing lots of example templates but what I really don’t want to do is write my own template language. That’s the last thing we need - another templating language.
The Zope community are pusing TAL and METAL which have the advantage of creating powerful templates which any HTML editor can manage. I think it gets pretty ugly trying to cram template commands into attributes though…
* Manuzhai thinks it’s not complex or difficult once you get into it.
