It's ok to write a little polemic here or there but don't be surprised when people react negatively to it. People are offended because you are saying they are incompetent at their profession.
Have the humility to understand that many of us have been doing this for years and have seen numerous attempts to revolutionize templating, and gasp have written webapps before the idea of templating really took hold.
If you want to persuade people to take up your ideas regarding DOM manipulation in the controller, I'd suggest not starting by telling people they are writing spahgetti code. It's a great way to get page views, it's a poor way to persuade people.
People probably would have reacted much better to your argument if you started with "Hey, I'm doing things this way and here's why it works for me" instead of "You're all idiots who write spaghetti code". Embedding XSL selectors in HTML attributes which is processed by a half-assed implementation of XSL in PHP is the kind of thing I think when thinking spaghetti code.
What you don't realize is that you've invented a new templating language based on XSL but with half the features. Those of us who've been around the block a few times like to call this inner-platform effect. We've also seen this idea before when it was pitched with J2EE and used XML with an XSL templating system.
I revolutionized as well the templating 3 years ago with pure.js... This one is an intentional xslt for json.
The result is a thin ~400 followers on http://github.com/pure/pure, we use it for our web app, and I get regular thanks emails. Even some copycats appeared.
Nothing changed. Server power is still wasted sending HTML to idle terminals using a markup/logic soup like we do since 1995.
A pretty useless fight, but at least I'm happy I tried.
Hi, thanks for the tips. I'm always interested in opinions on my writing style and how to communicate better.
Regarding your critique of Fragmentify, that's actually not so much what I'm advocating here as it is just the impetus for realising that there are 2 distinct components to templating which are: 1) the re-use of common assets, and 2) the application of some "logic" to display dynamic data.
It doesn't matter what you use to fragment your markup (I personally think that using XPath to manipulate an XML document isn't particularly off the mark but whatever, to each their own). Dreamweaver allows you to edit common assets pretty easily and then export a ZIP with head-to-foot complete HTML documents in it. I'm sure there are a million other ways to skin that cat.
What I'm saying is that the separation between "display logic" and "business logic" either doesn't exist or at the very least shouldn't be occuring between the backend and the frontend.
You could, if you wanted to, put your "view rendering" code in some other place in your application, but that's tangential to my case for completely removing any and all logic from templates and working solely with (and iterating solely with) HTML/CSS/JS when building your interfaces.
Personally I'd never use it because I intensely dislike the syntax of HTML and CSS and avoid it at all costs since discovering HAML/sass.
I find a text editor (vim in my case)/photoshop + haml/sass + live reload to be my most productive workflow, one screen for the text editor, one screen for the browser, when I save the browser reloads the page.
For me there are a lot of things that just work smoother by having the data populated, when I work with designers I just take whatever they give me (sometimes just a PSD) and work with it, if they need static HTML/CSS I just use wget/save as webpage to save the html and assets.
Have the humility to understand that many of us have been doing this for years and have seen numerous attempts to revolutionize templating, and gasp have written webapps before the idea of templating really took hold.
If you want to persuade people to take up your ideas regarding DOM manipulation in the controller, I'd suggest not starting by telling people they are writing spahgetti code. It's a great way to get page views, it's a poor way to persuade people.
People probably would have reacted much better to your argument if you started with "Hey, I'm doing things this way and here's why it works for me" instead of "You're all idiots who write spaghetti code". Embedding XSL selectors in HTML attributes which is processed by a half-assed implementation of XSL in PHP is the kind of thing I think when thinking spaghetti code.
What you don't realize is that you've invented a new templating language based on XSL but with half the features. Those of us who've been around the block a few times like to call this inner-platform effect. We've also seen this idea before when it was pitched with J2EE and used XML with an XSL templating system.