On Mon, Jun 02, 2003 at 04:26:27PM -0300, lucio wrote:
> All these choices left me with very little use for most of quixotes
> goodies. But i still have the content/presentation issue left. How do
> people on this list do it?
> 1- ptl and code togheter
> 2- ptl and code togheter but only when the code is presentation stuff
> 3- application logic - presentation logic - templates (what templates?)

First off, I (try to - this often gets mangled during spurts of
development and then cleaned up later) separate the data and app logic
from the presentation layer.  This is a well-known approach that used
to be called Model-View-Controller but has acquired other names as it
has evolved over the years.

As for the nitty-gritty of rendering web pages that are built up from
various more or less separate pieces, I have adopted the convention
that ALL content generation returns lists of strings, and use append()
and extend() a lot.  When the all-but-completed page gets back to the
top-level renderer, it '\n'.join(theList) and spits it out with
headers and site-wide boilerplate (CSS, sometimes some footer stuff)
and that's that.

The "generated HTML is lists of strings that become lines of text" has
worked out really well for me.  So far the data laundering that's
inherent in the app itself has been all I needed, but that's something
I'll have to address in the next version.

--
The true danger is when liberty is nibbled away,
for expedients, and by parts.  -- Edmund Burke