XHTML templating joy

The best web templating language I’ve used to date is the Template Attribute Language: TAL. It was originally developed for Zope, a fantastic python web application platform.
Most templating languages use special characters like [% foo %] or <%= foo %> to put dynamic content into a web page. TAL uses HTML attributes to put dynamic content in a page:

The benefit of doing it this way is that WYSIWYG editors can render page templates. Designers can edit your page templates easily, and you don’t have to worry about outside tools messing up your templates. You can also use HTML elements as your structure.

<h1 tal:content="here/title">Lorem Ipsum</h1>
<table>
<tr tal:repeat="row here/data">
<td tal:content="row/col1">dummy data</td>
<td tal:content="row/col2">dummy data</td>
</tr>
</table>

The <h1> tag will replace “Lorem Ipsum” with the title variable, and the table will loop over the data variable and write a <tr> for each element. This is so much better than other templating languages because it uses the page structure to fill in you HTML.
So that’s great if you use Zope or Plone, an awesome content management system. But what if you don’t? Other developers have seen how cool TAL is and ported it all around. There’s a Perl module Petal (via 0xDECAFBAD) and a PHP package PHPTAL. If you’re doing any sort of web application development, you owe it to yourself to check out TAL.