Re:Your templating engine sucks and everything you've ever w...
by dools on Sunday December 11, 2011 @01:04AM
(#3339414)
Loops with special treatment for first and last items is quite simply dealt with by including a list of items (for example) in the static HTML mockup, the first and last of which is different from the middle one.
EDIT: Also in response to the issue of double handling, I did mention this in the article:
In that second example of course, we've got a bunch of duplicate markup, but that's not our problem. That is the job of whatever system you're using to fragmentify your templates and re-use common assets
This does not seem like a worthwhile tradeoff to me. And the author doesn't address loops, which often want to have special treatment of first or last elements, even/odd rows, and other small bits of logic. When you combine these things, you're going to have a combinatorial problem, I can just imagine a shopping cart table with templates like shopping_cart_item_list__table_row__last_item__logged_in__even_row__multiple_quantities__discounted_item.html
And what's with the really confrontational tone? This article would've been improved by spending a couple hundred fewer words putting words in the reader's mouth and insulting their tools/code. There's a chance this could be useful in some situations, but I sure don't want to spend any time talking to this guy.