I would interpret your question a bit differently than others in this 
thread...

I see all kinds of html template system that use new tags - for 
example, JSP uses <%...%> tags PHP uses <?foo ?> tags; ColdFusion uses 
<cf*> tags (where * represents such commands like loop, var, etc...).  
In fact, the preponderance of non-pure html templating systems led one 
blogger on O'Reilly to bemoan why there are no solutions that leave 
HTML code in HTML space, and business logic in the programming space. 
[http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/wlg/2423]

I'm working on a templating system right now that works as an abstract 
class.  It will scan a well-formed (in the XML sense) HTML document, 
and grab subtrees where the root of the subtree has a code attribute - 
this attribute isn't in any of the published standards, so I feel 
pretty safe using it for now.  The subtrees are then passed into 
methods that do the business logic.

I also add a rule that if I have any unprocessed subtrees, that they 
are removed from the document before sending the results to the client.

I am fairly close to being done, but I've hit some snags; if anyone is 
interested in the project, please let me know.

PS: Only after I started the project did I discover that there were 
templating systems available to Ruby - at least one of which is quite 
close to my ideas.  Too bad they have names that meant nothing about 
html templating, or I'd have learned about it sooner...

-rh

On Thursday, February 13, 2003, at 09:20 PM, Tom Sawyer wrote:

> curious, i've realized that i have never seen any html template 
> systems that
> use new tags. for some reason i've always assumed there was a reason 
> for it,
> but now i thinking about it and i'm not sure what it would be. for ex-
>
>   <var name="x">
>
> is there a good reason for not doing something like this?
>
> -- 
> tom sawyer, aka transami
> transami / transami.net
>
>
>
---
Robert Hahn,
Senior Web Developer,
Quarry Integrated Communications