launchpad-dev team mailing list archive

[Jonathan Lange <jml@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, Nov 3, 2010 at 11:47 AM, Gavin Panella
<gavin.panella@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On 3 November 2010 11:22, Jonathan Lange <jml@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> ...
>>   => Templates will die
>>     * Content vs Presentation better done w/ HTML vs CSS than data
>> structures vs HTML
>
> I can't parse that :) Could you expand it a little?
>

Sure. I'll put it in my own words, though, perhaps accidentally
injecting my own thinking.

We used to think that templates were a great way to separate content
from presentation. Under that thinking, a template represents
presentation, and is made up of HTML; the content is, roughly,
server-side objects that know nothing of presentation. The app server
would moosh together the server-side objects (content) and the
template (presentation) to make a fully-formed HTML page.

However, because there's lots and lots of Javascript on the client
side now, templates make much less sense, particularly for web
applications. Javascript can build elements and widgets very quickly
in response to fresh data from the webserver. If you have HTML at all,
it could be better considered part of the content. In terms of
presentation, you can do absolutely everything in the world with CSS.

Make sense?

jml