[TYPO3-dev] My first (for me) advanced extension

[S. Teuber]

Hi Ries,

>> We already know where this leads to:
>> Any technology/program/solution is "best" just to specific needs,
>> there's not "*the* best" thing - and after all, we like what we are
>> used to generally better that things we don't really know yet.
>
> I don't agree on this one really.
> SMARTY has ALL features typo3's templating system has. Thus smarty is
> a "better" technology for the same perpose.

As long as the features which are unique to Smarty, i.e. which are not 
available in TYPO3s templating system, are not needed (and most 
extensions do very limited things with their HTML templates, just 
replacing a few markers with some database content), it is like this:

- TYPO3 templating can get the thing done
- Smarty needs to be loaded additionally, thus having TWO programs
  in one system than handle the same task,
  leading to (performance affecting) redundancy, plus
  leading to developers needing to know two systems ("brain overhead")

So no, unless you explicitly need the features Smarty has that TYPO3 has 
not, Smarty is not "better", sorry. It may be more elegant, it may have 
better strategies or simpler syntax, it may have more features - I don't 
know about that. But leaving the academic and religious points of view 
behind, from a pragmatic point of view, it's redundant in most cases and 
thus "bad".
  
 
> Smarty is just handy to move some of the desission making into HTML
> instead of marker replacement.

Why do we seperate the layout from the code if we put control structures 
(code!) back into the HTML (layout)? ;-)

But this is, to a certain point, religious. 
"Why would I load a template library to print out one line of HTML?" 

Sven