

Ask HN: Do we still need static html templating? - icey

I'm playing around with a few new frameworks for an idea I'm working on, and some of them build HTML directly in the language (Compojure, Seaside). The old-school developer in me says that this is a bad idea, since designers can't mess around with the HTML.<p>However, I know that CSS is the primary way of doing design these days, so maybe it's not a big deal.<p>So, my question is: if you're building a web app and you plan on getting a designer involved at some point, do you think static HTML templates are necessary?<p>As an aside, if anyone is building / has built web applications in any framework like this, (I think Nevow handles things similarly) I'd love to hear your experiences.
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cd34
MVC keeps your developers out of the HTML and your designers out of the Code.

Smalltalk got it right in the early 70s. It is still right today.

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daleharvey
very much so I think, I am on the second iteration of a web framework thing,
in the first one the templating was done through a reasonably complicated
server side interface.

The second iteration I have pushed the templating into html itself (using data
attributes and reserved classes) and find it incredibly easier to comprehend
the round trip

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dstorrs
Agreed.

Also, do you really want to tell your designer that in order to add a new
(id|class) to a tag, he needs to talk to a developer? Do you want to tell a
developer that he needs to pull aside whenever this designer taps him on the
shoulder? Or do you want the designer to block on the developer "until he's at
a good stopping point"?

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icey
That's a good point. I know there are people writing non-trivial apps in
frameworks that don't use templates; I'm not sure how they handle this sort of
thing today.

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radu_floricica
Theoretically you could add unique ids to every tag and common sense classes,
but from my experience the guy who will work on that html won't like it. I
don't know if he could work with it or not, but I'm pretty sure he'll protest.
It will break too many assumptions for him.

