Proposed template inheritance syntax
Adam Atlas
something resembling inheritance while still remaining Pythonic in
spirit and style.
Firstly, the 'render' object should be an automatic global. Templates
should have access to the template environment.
Then we add a $return directive, with the syntax:
$return <any string or __str__able object>
Doing `$return self` would emulate the usual behaviour (but of course
that would not be required). Meanwhile, you could also do $return
render.someOtherTemplate(self) or whatever you need to do. To
demonstrate, here's how the example from
<http://webpy.infogami.com/templetor> would work.
page.html:
$def with (post)
$var title: $post.title
<p>$markdown(post.body)</p>
<p class="byline">by $post.author</p>
$return render.base(self)
base.html:
$def with (body)
<html><head>
<title>$body.title</title>
</head><body>
<h1>$body.title</h1>
$body
</body></html>
That way, you can just call page(post), instead of base(page(post))
(which, as I explained elsewhere, is rather inelegant and violates MVC
separation). The template itself elects to pass its output through
base.html before returning; that's not a job for the controller.
As a side effect, making the render object an automatic global will
also allow simple inclusion, for those who prefer that style to the
inheritance model.
Thoughts?