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Ask HN: Do we still need static html templating?
I'm playing around with a few new frameworks for an idea I'm working on, and some of them build HTML directly in the language (Compojure, Seaside). The old-school developer in me says that this is a bad idea, since designers can't mess around with the HTML.
However, I know that CSS is the primary way of doing design these days, so maybe it's not a big deal.
So, my question is: if you're building a web app and you plan on getting a designer involved at some point, do you think static HTML templates are necessary?
As an aside, if anyone is building / has built web applications in any framework like this, (I think Nevow handles things similarly) I'd love to hear your experiences.
- radu_floricica 17y agoTheoretically you could add unique ids to every tag and common sense classes, but from my experience the guy who will work on that html won't like it. I don't know if he could work with it or not, but I'm pretty sure he'll protest. It will break too many assumptions for him.
- daleharvey 17y agovery much so I think, I am on the second iteration of a web framework thing, in the first one the templating was done through a reasonably complicated server side interface. The second iteration I have pushed the templating into html itself (using data attributes and reserved classes) and find it incredibly easier to comprehend the round trip
- dstorrs 17y agoAgreed. Also, do you really want to tell your designer that in order to add a new (id|class) to a tag, he needs to talk to a developer? Do you want to tell a developer that he needs to pull aside whenever this designer taps him on the shoulder? Or do you want the designer to block on the developer "until he's at a good stopping point"?
- icey 17y agoThat's a good point. I know there are people writing non-trivial apps in frameworks that don't use templates; I'm not sure how they handle this sort of thing today.
- cd34 17y agoMVC keeps your developers out of the HTML and your designers out of the Code. Smalltalk got it right in the early 70s. It is still right today.