view / template issues

[bobbywilson0]

Dear Guardians of the Temple,

I have had a problem since basically the beginning of my web
development career. It has improved but is still very present.

Views are always the dumping ground of poor logic, designer breaking
code, coder breaking design. I have blamed it on my team members, but
can everyone really be wrong? My opinion is that views shouldn't
contain a minimal amount of logic (I have a preference for none),
should be editable by non-programmer designers, and be reasonably
DRY.

I do think markaby, mustache, and effigy are steps in the right
direction.

My main issue seems to be designers only want to write html and css.

With HTML 5 coming out I am wondering if there is some way to leverage
the data attributes to link dynamic content to, specify loops, and
link to methods.

This in combination with using CSS type selectors as blocks in a ruby
class file that matches the name of the output html, could be an even
closer step to making views manageable.

I haven't done any work on this yet, I am mostly interested in getting
feedback about the feasibility of a system like this, and also what
performance issues I will be up against.

thanks
Bobby

[Magnus Holm]

Hey Bobby,

I think you're definitely on to something; and what you're describing
is basically what I like to call Mockup Template Engines. I've written
some words about it here before:
http://groups.google.com/group/guardians-of-the-temple/browse_thread/thread/b106b9c4c94609c5

Could you read the thread and see if it matches your ideas? Any ways
we can improve the idea?

// Magnus Holm