Kid 0.6
Kid 0.6 is available.
This is a feature release with some pretty important enhancements including Template Inheritence, Match Templates (kind of like XSLT's), cElementTree support, and a refined Python API. Quite a bit of time was spent on the documentation as well.
The Release Notes have more information on everything that has changed.
Kid is an XML based template language for Python that merges the best of Zope's TAL, PHP, and XSLT into a single coherent package. It was created to provide a simple method of generating dynamic, well-formed XML documents using familiar concepts from popular text templating languages.
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Release Notes
http://lesscode.org/doc/kid/0.6/notes.html
Project Information
The false promise of template languages
Kid by Example
Kid 0.5 is available and I think I finally like it enough to start dumping out some example templates and API usage...
ElementTree on the come-up
I had a very small number of complaints related to basing Kid on ElementTree. This came in two forms:
SAX and DOM are “standard” and while ElementTree is a drastically improved system for processing XML in Python, it doesn't matter because everyone already knows SAX/DOM.
“libxml2 is teh rawk!”
First, if Python's W3C DOM standard based xml.dom package were a movie, it
would be called Elf, staring xml.dom. It's the episode of Little House
on the Prairie where Alien asks Michael Landon for permission to
marry his daughter. It does not belong here!
Next, in terms of pythonicness, libxml2 is almost worse than xml.dom but you
at least get something for it: they don't even have a word to describe this
level of “fast” and it comes along with XPath, RelaxNG, XSD, XML-Base,
XInclude, and XSLT. My issue with libxml2 is just that it's a bad dependency
for a project like Kid that wants to be able to run on cheap web space with
bare-bones Python support. There are a lot of hosting providers that aren't
going to have libxml2 or the option of compiling from source.
I went with ElementTree because it's simple, pythonic, and fast enough. I also had a feeling we'd be seeing more development around ElementTree, which brings us nicely to why I'm posting.
Ross' Taint.. I mean, Tate.. I mean, Rawke!
I completely forgot to mention what is quite possibly the most important event
to date in Kid history: the
first real application to incorporate Kid
templating is Ross Burton's sexy Tate (I said, “sexy Tate,” not
“sexy Taint!”). It's an elegant, RDF / XHTML photo gallery that
I'm dying to get my hands on. If you're into nice semantic usage of (X)HTML,
make sure to peep the page source and check out the correct usage of <ul>’s
and whatnot.
Ross has reported a few issues and even mentioned plans for packaging Kid for Debian. He's the proprietor of the excellent Sound Juicer CD ripper for GNOME 2, Debian contributor, and takes some kick-ass photos to boot.
Kid 0.4
I've been quietly hacking away on the Kid template system. There's been two releases with a lot of new features and changes so I'm playing catch-up here. I have a lot to write about so I'm going to cut this up into a couple of posts - I'm trying to break this tendency I have to let posts run too long.
Web Application Component Toolkit - Template View
More on cross-breading ZPT and XSLT - Transformation Templates in Kid
This is the second post in response to cross-breading ZPT and XSLT. I'd like to dig into how I'd like templating to work in Kid and Leslie opens the door for me:
... maybe this is the sort of thing Ryan's thinking about-- I wonder how hard it would be to hack this into Kid? It would give only a subset of XSLT's capabilities in trade for simplicity, and would only offer the
pullapproach, but it would give XML-pipelining to a ZPT-ish technology.
Why isn't there a simple XSLT?
Leslie de 0xDECAFBAD talks a bit about cross-breading ZPT and XSLT and mentions Kid along the way. This is the first in a series of response posts.
Cross-breeding XSLT and ZPT
Kid 0.2 and a note on Template Design
I pushed up a much needed 0.2 release of Kid today. I hadn't meant for my previous post to be an announcement but I got quite a few comments showing interest and was surprised to see some people actually grabbing the 0.1.1 release. As it was, for all intents and purposes, not a release at all. The 0.2 release should be somewhat more stable. At least enough to dive in and play around.
In search of a Pythonic, XML-based Templating Language
I've been searching for the perfect Python based XML template language. I was happy to find TAL (and specifically, SimpleTAL) a while back but, although neither of us wants to admit it, we've been growing apart for some time now. I spent last week looking for options and, after careful consideration and planning (read: beer and a nap), decided to just build the XML template language I really wanted.
There's at least four billion and nine text based template languages for Python but there aren't a lot of options that fit nicely into the XML tool-chain. Or, if they do fit nicely into the XML tool-chain, they don't fit nicely with Python.
My dreamboat XML template language would combine the pythonicness and simplicity of PTL, the templating features and pipeline-ability of XSLT, and the terseness of Zope's TAL. I'm building it, it's called Kid, and I'm making good progress to be honest.
But I have this overwhelming NIH feeling so I've decided the best thing to do is to run through the current set of tools and take a professional, objective look at why each isn't getting it done for me (i.e. make fun of minor flaws and limitations until I feel better about myself). Herewith, a look at the good and the bad in the Python XML templating space...