Skip Montanaro wrote:
>     Graham> I've written a slightly cleaner Nevow implementation.
>
> I know that Quixote is aimed at programmers, but I find it hard to believe
> that obscuring the HTML as much as something like Nevow does is a good thing
> in the long run.  Somewhere along the way someone's likely to want a
> professionally designed website.
> It seems that it would be an awful lot of
> work to take a web designer's HTML mockup and convert it to something like
> Nevow.  It still wouldn't be trivial with PTL, but I think it would be a lot
> easier.

I've never in this situation (building an app from a "finished" HTML
mockup), but I'll add my two cents anyway.

I don't think the Nevow syntax would be harder, assuming you get XHTML
from the Web designer, or you can Tidy her work: it's just an XML parser
away.

I think that strict adherence to standards is the real issue here. I
would hope that the designer is writing in plain, strict XHTML and using
CSS for visual look-and-feel. If I had any influence in the project, I
would mandate it. It wouldn't be hard to adapt the XHTML into either PTL
or Nevow bracket-expressions. Or you could go the external-file route
that Donovan described, using Newvow itself (or ZPT, or any of the
gazillion embedded-logic templating schemes, I guess).

If structure can be mostly-frozen early in the project, then you
shouldn't have too many round-trips: structure is all you need to worry
about. While you're coding the logic, the designer can tweak the CSS in
parallel until the cows come home.

If the Web designer isn't writing in structural HTML with CSS... well,
may God help the programmer (I hope it's not me)! I think you'll get a
mess no matter what the chosen solution.

I would love to read some articles on this topic from the Web designer's
perspective: horror stories, perhaps, about working with developers and
their nasty little scripting languages. Recommendations?

-- Graham