>===== Original Message From Avi Bryant <avi / beta4.com> =====
>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.
>
With that said, my needs are for data delivery, and that data
needs to be delivered to many places in many different formats.
I am not in the business of developing wonderful web pages.  I
am in the business of making sure the data arrives, and what
you are describing is useless for me.

So for the goals I will have for the forseeable future, IOWA is
the wrong wheel.

Cheers,
Ben