SCSS Taking ZPT to the Next Level
Problems/Complaints
- ZPT is ugly
- Designers still need to wade through code, and coders still need to wade
through design (sometimes mucked up by tools or hands)
- ZPT requires well-formed XHTML, which is less forgiving, not as
supported by tools
- Still a fundamental mixing of levels, structure and logic
- ZPT requires the output to be SGML
Solution
Explicit separation of structural HTML and programmatic logic into
different documents or document sections.
Luckily, an existing standard already exists to separate structure and
presentation, cascading style sheets. We can leverage this standard to
implement a server-side style sheet that can be used to apply logical
constructs to static, structural HTML much the same way that css applies
presentation.
CSS consists of a language and a rich set of rules for resolving the
appropriate style to structure mapping based on nesting rules, classes and
instance designations (ids). It also supports a form of multiple
inheritance which allows you to layer style elements in extremely complex
ways. An scss implementation would use these same rules to allow a more OO
approach to template design. A given template could have any arbitrary
number of server-side style sheets that would be combined using the
standard cascading rules to resolve its logical behavior.
Example
At this time, the scss attributes are highly-speculative, and this example
is just to illustrate some possible implementation of scss::
Today is: 2/5/02
This is the title
What's Left?
I need to work out the mechanism for macro expansion if it is desired. I
am currently leaning toward using insertion of separate objects as an
alternative. A "macro collection" object, could conceivably be created to
clump these together (ala DTML Template).