Template components

They should:

• Be format-agnostic (not specific to HTML nor XML);
• Allow custom tags;
• Allow access to external parameters (through either dynamic bindings, or explicit injection); and,
• Have a logical syntax.

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Existing systems under investigation are:

• Lisp
  • ​BTL
  • ​CL-EMB
  • ​CLHP
  • ​HTML-TEMPLATE
  • ​KPAX
  • ​text-template
  • ​trivial-template
  • ​xhtml.lisp
  • ​XLSP (a.k.a. "lisp server pages" or lsp)
  • ​yaclml
• Other
  • ​AHTS
  • ​Cheetah
  • ​Clearsilver
  • ​The Django template language
  • ​EmPy
  • ​htmltmpl
  • ​JSP (Java Server Pages)
  • ​PSP (Python Server Pages)
  • ​Smarty
  • ​Spyce (Python)
  • ​Template Toolkit

Systems no longer under consideration (at least for syntax) are:

System	Reason
CL-WHO	Not a markup language
HTOUT	Not a markup language
HUNCHENTOOT	No template functionality
LML	Not a markup language
LML2	Not a markup language
Weblocks	No template functionality

Note, however, that LML2 does claim to have user-extensible tags. It would be good to see how they did it. Weblocks also has a render architecture that may be good.