(2005-10-03) Kid Templating

Ryan Tomayko on his motivation for developing the Kid Template Language. At some point, I became convinced that existing, basic web architecture solved many of the problems we were seeing with Web Services adoption. The problem wasn't that WS was incapable of solving the technology issues (it's quite adequate), the problem was that it was incapable of solving the social issues. It far exceeded the threshold of acceptable complexity for true adoption by this large community of people whose primary goal is to solve business problems. Sounds like a ReST attitude. The problem with using templates to produce XML (including XHTML) is that it is exceedingly hard to be conservative in what you do. Most template engines are text based, making it easy to miss well-formedness errors. There are also a range of character encoding issues that template languages could ease but often simply ignore and sometimes make worse. Kid is a simple attempt at building features that aid in conservativeness into the template engine.