On Thu, 19 Apr 2001, Benjamin J. Tilly wrote:

> I would need to look at IOWA closely to say more, but my
> preference is definitely that _neither_ the templating
> solution nor the developer has any business trying to
> understand HTML.  The developer shouldn't because the
> developer doesn't want to become a bottleneck for the
> designer.  The templating solution shouldn't because it
> is very likely to need to deal with many kinds of text,
> not just HTML.

It depends very much on what your goals are.  Yes, there is a need for
general templating solutions that can deal with any kind of text.  There
is also a need for general XLib calls that can deal with any kind of
graphics.  But if you are building a particular kind of desktop app, it
is much nicer to write to a widget toolkit, or better yet, an
application framework.  The direction I was trying to move with IOWA was a
system for HTML - not XML, not WML, at least not yet - that allowed the
same high level of abstraction (or higher) that you get when working with
a good desktop framework. I'm not sure how you could provide that with 
a more general templating system.

Avi