I’ve been thinking about template languages lately.
Some years ago when I was still coding PHP, I decided to give Smarty a try. Why? Well, it seemed to have a nice enough syntax. And if it’s not real code it sure is easier for a designer without deep knowledge of PHP to edit it, right?
Turns out that it isn’t. If you’re working with a template language you still need to grasp basic concepts of programming, such as loops and output formatting. As soon as your structures become a little more complex the once beautiful syntax quickly becomes cluttered and error-prone.
The reason why I’ve been thinking about the use of template languages is that I’ve stumbled across Ruby Waves - which apparently uses Markaby and will also support HAML and SASS pretty soon. All three allow you to write your view templates (and CSS files) in pure Ruby code.
Don’t get my wrong here - I like what these guys do from a programmer’s perspective. But I don’t think it’s a really DRY approach when it comes to work flow. The designer (that usually doesn’t know the template language of your choice) will build their stuff in plain old HTML and hand it over to a programmer who then converts it into Ruby code - so basically the same work is done twice, once by the designer and once by the programmer. And I hear there’s still people out there that like to design their web pages using a WYSIWYG editor - that of course only speaks HTML.
Performance is yet another concern: Template languages need to be parsed which will slow them down eventually, especially at servers with high traffic or older hardware.
And if this isn’t enough already, you may just ask yourself: What is really the big difference between these two:
<h2>My Title</h2> h2 "My Title"It’s subtle, isn’t it?