[Ur] A direction for Ur/Web

Sat Mar 26 19:14:58 EDT 2011

Marc Weber wrote:
> Excerpts from Adam Chlipala's message of Sat Mar 26 18:56:48 +0100 2011:
>    
>> I don't understand which hypothetical design structure of an Ur/Web
>> library you are considering here.  What do you want to do and what do
>> you think would go wrong?
>>      
> If you use PHP, Ruby, Plone, any dynamic CMS you have a directory called
> /templates/main.template.
>
> If you look into it you find
>
> <html>{ var here }</html>
>
> like syntax.
>
> So this is very very easy for anybody to customize. You don't even have
> to know the language the CMS was written in.
>
> Urweb can't do this easily - because everything is "compile time".
>    

I don't see any fundamental difference.  PHP scripts depend on a PHP 
interpreter installed on the server.  It would be easy to build a 
similar Ur/Web "interpreter" that first calls the compiler if the 
"script" has changed since last compilation.

Ur/Web also supports almost exactly the syntax you're suggesting for 
templates, and it would be easy to use a preprocessor to support any 
reasonable alternative.