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README for Text::TagTemplate

Copyright (C) 1999 SF Interactive, Inc.  All rights reserved.
License: GNU LGPL

Maintainer: Matisse Enzer <matisse@matisse.net>
Author:  Jacob Davies <jacob@well.com>

$Id: README,v 1.7 2005/10/23 20:25:21 matisse Exp $

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This is the Text::TagTemplate module.

TagTemplate is designed to completely separate HTML/XML coding from
the coding of the application logic.  It's also designed to be flexible,
to use a template interface that is simple and easy for non-programmers
to understand, and to be reasonably fast.

There is not much particularly web-specific about it, and indeed it may well
prove useful in other application areas; however, that is the main focus of the
design.

TagTemplate is a lightweight module that parses files replacing special
tags with dynamically generated content. The tags look like HTML or XML
tags, e.g.
	<#search_results row_template="verbose.template" size="4">

The module parses recursively and tags may be embedded in other tags.

The module provides methods for associating each tag name ("search_results"
in the example above) with a replacement action, which will usually be
a subroutine. The tag attributes are passed to the subroutine as a hash
reference. Whatever te subroutine returns replaces the entire tag.

The module includes extensive documentation.

There are other modules that do similar things that you may or may not be
interested in:

	CGI::FastTemplate
	Text::Template
	Text::FillIn

If you know of others, please inform me.

To install this module, you should just be able to do:

	perl Makefile.PL
	make
	make test
	make install

Once you've done that, use ``perldoc Text::TagTemplate'' for more
documentation.  You may be interested in looking at the example CGI application
supplied in the example/ subdirectory, which demonstrates some of the functions
of this module and may help you towards building your first application with
it.

I'd love to hear your suggestions, amendments, comments, bug reports, bug
fixes, and the like.  Direct them to <matisse@matisse.net>.

If you use this module in a web application, I'd also love to hear about it,
particularly if the web application is also free software.
