Good point. Maybe it's something to do with the fact that Lispers are so used to the whole "Code is Data, Data is Code" concept that you get within the Lisp family of languages? I guess I don't really see too much difference anymore between: <head>foo</head><body>bar</body> and (:head foo(:body bar)) Except that the 2nd I consider far more flexible for my personal needs. YMMV

The way I separate it out (and keep it sane!) is by trying to stick to a fairly strict MVC style and keep the backend code in separate functions away from the frontend cl-who templates. But this does still require some initial work in translating the initial html templates to my lisp templates, so I'll agree with you there.

And yes, it certainly does make it more difficult when dealing with 3rd party designers. I have to translate all their basic html templates into lisp/cl-who syntax. But I don't find that too much of a hardship tbh and the tradeoffs are worth it.

>I have to translate all their basic html templates into lisp/cl-who syntax. But I don't find that too much of a hardship tbh and the tradeoffs are worth it.

That would not work for more complicated projects at all.

I think the templating library you are looking for is cl-mustache. I am using it currently for a SQL template engine in one of my internal work projects.

First one that's shown promise.