   Vision Web Template Language
  Hey all. I posted about this in the Web Development forum and got exactly zero responses, so maybe I'll get some more interest here.I just released a new version of one of my language projects, Vision, a small, easy-to-use language for creating Web sites. Vision is something like a Web template system (at least Google says so), rather like PHP. But unlike that abomination, Vision requires separation between a page template and the generators of dynamic content that fill that template. Like using CSS to separate markup from styling, separating templating from content generation is very helpful in creating a robust, modular, and highly maintainable site design.You should check out the original post, read the documentation, browse the Sourceforge project page, and ask me questions here.Any feedback is much appreciated! It's useful to me, so I want to share in case it's useful to you.   
  I really like the idea how you separate template from content. That is a great paradigm much more web designers should adhere to.I wonder whether it has arithmetic's etc, and text processing. Or is that why you call it light-weight?Personally, PHP isn't the biggest obstacle for webdesign, I find. Sure, I liked it more if it were strictly-typed / statically-typed, but this is also because of the HTML mess. I think HTML + AJAX + JS + CSS + PHP should all be one language, perhaps 2, but absolutely NOT 5 languages! I think it is a terrible mess, you can notice how the HTML standard from back then was absolutely not calculated to do the websites we have nowadays, therefore people added technologies like JS/AJAX/CSS and perhaps PHP.Also, your language is mostly for small websites, as you say. And I think for small websites the separation of template and content is not of vital importance. For big sites it sure is, small website can get away with it...The documentation page is well done really, that's a big plus for using it...most open-source projects have terrible documentation. Do you also have a reference list of all commands?I like the idea behind the project, keep it up ;)   ;Quote:I wonder whether it has arithmetic's etc, and text processing. Or is that why you call it light-weight?I'm working on support for numeric expressions and basic conditional and looping constructs. For the most part I'm trying to keep it "lightweight" by keeping it small and avoiding letting it become a feature dump like PHP. That is my main gripe with that language, by the way; it has never had a clean, unified design, though admittedly it's gotten much better in recent versions.Quote:I think HTML + AJAX + JS + CSS + PHP should all be one language, perhaps 2, but absolutely NOT 5 languages!To be fair, AJAX boils down to a single &#106avascript object, so it doesn't count as a language, though it does certainly result in an important design methodology. I definitely agree with the sentiment that these technologies should be unified, but given the state of Web technology these days, the means of adding support for new paradigms that is generally accepted as the cleanest and most robust is to create a new, domain-specific language, that is both simple (CSS) and well-rooted in the existing languages (&#106avascript/DOM). That said, HTML/CSS/JS/Vision/(Perl/PHP/Python) seems like a perfectly valid stack to me.Quote:Also, your language is mostly for small websites, as you say. And I think for small websites the separation of template and content is not of vital importance. For big sites it sure is, small website can get away with it...That's valid. I'm actually trying Vision out on a larger site right now, and I find that the size of the site directly affects which features of Vision are most useful. Small sites benefit from the ability to quickly produce similar pages, and maybe to send a few form variables off to a script on another site; larger sites benefit from the separation of templates from content, and the ability to directly invoke content-generating scripts.Quote:The documentation page is well done really, that's a big plus for using it...most open-source projects have terrible documentation. Do you also have a reference list of all commands?Thank you. I may split it up a little bit, as it's growing difficult to keep the monolithic page in order. The home page reads more like a tutorial right now; I'll definitely create an API reference page for quick browsing.Quote:I like the idea behind the project, keep it up ;)That's just what I wanna hear! ^_^