Re: Rails and Seaside

I just want to chime in with some, hopefully "real world" and useful,
data points.  I used to work for Digital Creations (ney Zope, Inc.)
and worked heavily on their DHTML and later templating systems. DHTML
was ok for some sites, and not bad honestly for CSS-driven stuff. What
we had, at the time, and pre-Firefox, etc., was engineers who wanted
nothing to do with making things pretty, and designers who didn't
understand even basic flow-control logic. So along comes TAL and a
fully round-trippable templating system.

It works, and it's painful to use. It is, as far as I know, the only
templating system out there that you can round-trip through
Dreamweaver or GoLive, and have still work in the system after. This
is a great accomplishment -- but largely irrelevent.

Use CSS. If your designers push back, fire them. If your developers
push back about writing basic HTML, fire them too.

As Avi and others have pointed out... modern browsers can do nearly
everything necessary with CSS you could want. Tables are great -- for
tabular data. If you remove the table-minded layout mechanism, and
focus on making the right bits come out of the Seaside app for
HTML/XHTML, then CSS can make it pretty.

To paraphrase:

1) Make it work
2) Make it right
3) Make it pretty
4) Make it fast enough.

Chris
--
| Christopher Petrilli
| petrilli@xxxxxxxxx