Saturday, January 26, 2008

Templating for html developers

There was a presentation at railsconf in 2007 by Bruce Williams where he speaker talked about DRYing up your views. Now, I wasn't personally there but I've read an overview of the talk and I realized something. There were several template systems he compared but there was only one, maybe two, that someone who know html/css could use. That was DRYML and, maybe, Haml.

That right there is the fundamental problem with all of the templating systems, and even the presentation. They were all aimed at ruby developers. Now, if you are doing a small project, this is good. The team probably won't have many people on it and all of them are probably ruby developers. And you want your ruby devs to program in ruby. That's what they know. But this argument falls apart when you work on a large project with actual interface developers.

Working on a large project with many rails developers and a couple of html developers will cripple your development time if you have to use ruby for templating. It means that when your interface devs create a moderately complex site, one or two of your ruby devs have to translate it to whatever templating system you're using and get all the glue between your controllers and views. If your system is very complex, using a lot of javascript and css, then the problem gets worse.

This is why I'm interested in DRYML. I want a template that I can give to someone who knows html/css and be able to write in it. Then, every so often, have one of the rails developers put in the glue between the controller and view to have it working.

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