Marcus Whybrow - Latest Comments

Re: Creating a Cacti Alternative

Marcus Whybrow — Thu, 16 Feb 2012 20:50:03 -0000

Hi Frank, I haven't continued the project past its university life-time. I don't have a personal need for it anymore either so I guess I have to declare the project asleep.

Re: Creating a Cacti Alternative

Frank — Wed, 15 Feb 2012 13:42:03 -0000

Hey Marcus, how did it go, did you get started on the project? Sounds quite interesting with Protovis..

/franksemi

Re: Creating a Cacti Alternative

Bruce Bushby — Tue, 30 Aug 2011 15:41:36 -0000

ooooh eventlet and websockets .....now thats the business!

Have you looked at Python Flask? I tried to get into Django and bfg.....they just seemed too big for what I wanted (small Intranet webapps for financial clients) .... step in Python Flask.

Re: What’s the Deal With: Django Template Indentation

Erik Allik — Fri, 04 Feb 2011 19:27:07 -0000

XML based templating languages solve this by using "dummy" elements, and they often reformat the output as well I guess. But the example I gave would solve the problem in Django for the majority of cases. For the rest of the cases, you just:

<div>
    {% for post in posts %}
    <div>{{ post.title }}</div> 
    <div>{{ post.body }}</div>
    {% endfor %}
</div>

It's not too bad because using XML based looping and conditional constructs will already give you the readability and indentation you want, so having a few "old-style" loops in the mix wouldn't affect the big picture.

Re: What’s the Deal With: Django Template Indentation

Marcus Whybrow — Fri, 04 Feb 2011 15:57:02 -0000

This would work nicely in the example you have provided, but this does not deal with repeating multiple elements. Moving the for loop definition to the parent ul element would solve this issue, but introduces the new one of not including some elements in the iterative construction.

I think it comes down to being a restrictive problem, yes you can gain the desired output which we have been talking about, but at the cost of preventing some common use cases.

Re: What’s the Deal With: Django Template Indentation

Erik Allik — Fri, 04 Feb 2011 06:05:20 -0000

The fundamental issue is that the Django templating language is not meant to integrate with HTML (or XML based languages in general). Imagine if instead of wrapping an element with a for-endfor pair, you could:

<ul>
    <li django:for="post in posts">{{ post.title }}</li>
</ul>

This would solve both the indenting issue, and the issue of duplication of information as the current {% for %}{% endfor %} often duplicates the already existing structure.

Since it would probably be hopeless to ask this to be added in a future version of Django, I've thought of layering another language such as TAL on top of Django, i.e. first process the template with TAL, and then send to Django templating.

Re: Django Preview

Marcus Whybrow — Sun, 18 Jul 2010 17:00:14 -0000

Form preview locks you into a certain workflow and assumes you want to apply your changes at the end. I also want to create something that can just be enabled in your models with some minimal configuration on your part.

Maybe I could use form previews in order to emulate these features, but I think it would be too limiting.

Re: Django Preview

jakub — Sun, 18 Jul 2010 16:38:42 -0000

Couldn't django.contrib.formtools.preview be used?

http://docs.djangoproject.c...

Re: Creating a Cacti Alternative

Jeff Schroeder — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 12:45:56 -0000

Google "mongodb ate my data"... It seems to me using another kv store like cassandra or even riak would be a much better idea.

Re: What’s the Deal With: Django Template Indentation

Marcus Whybrow — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 07:33:56 -0000

Judging by the github README this:

%ul#atheletes
    - for athelete in athelete_list
        %li.athelete= athelete.name

still turns into this:

<ul id="atheletes">
    {% for athelete in athelete_list %}
        <li class="athelete">{{ athelete.name }}</li>
    {% endfor %}
</ul>

Which doesn't solve the HTML indentation problem. However something like this could be the answer, and I have not looked at HamlPy in enough detail to know that it is not that answer.

Re: What’s the Deal With: Django Template Indentation

Jan Rzepecki — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 06:16:45 -0000

Maybe let's change to different approach, if visual readablity of code matters.
http://github.com/jessemiller/HamlPy

Re: What’s the Deal With: Django Template Indentation

Robert Frost — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 07:10:36 -0000

If you use spaceless as compression instead of gzip you, my good sir, are a retard. Ta.

Re: What’s the Deal With: Django Template Indentation

Marcus Whybrow — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 08:09:29 -0000

Yer that sounds like an efficient way to do things, what would be really cool is if the code was minified when DEBUG = False and tidied when DEBUG = True.

Re: What’s the Deal With: Django Template Indentation

Harro van der Klauw — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 08:06:09 -0000

Maybe write a middleware that does post processing to tidy the html.

Re: What’s the Deal With: Django Template Indentation

Henrique — Mon, 05 Jul 2010 22:22:13 -0000

Just make sure your document is not broken. The browser doesn't care about the pretty indentation of your HTML. In fact, you *should* be minifing the most you can, as it's actually a site tuning recommendation, and even factors into Google's pagerank.

Re: What’s the Deal With: Django Template Indentation

Dougal Matthews — Mon, 05 Jul 2010 03:46:46 -0000

I think I'd have to say that this probably lies in the category of problems that either don't really exist or don't need solving. After all, its not really a problem how the HTML looks as there are plenty of ways to view it and thus its not really a problem.

Besides, extra indentation hardly makes the HTML unreadable. Not like the output some websites create. Try looking at the output of a .NET site for example.

Re: What’s the Deal With: Django Template Indentation

ericflo — Sat, 03 Jul 2010 14:02:47 -0000

Jinja2 deals with whitespace (at least partly) by allowing the user to append an - to templatetags: http://jinja.pocoo.org/2/do...

Re: What’s the Deal With: Django Template Indentation

Marcus Whybrow — Sat, 03 Jul 2010 13:10:34 -0000

Right, so you are putting more focus on getting the correct output rather than nicely indented template code?

Yes you are quite right about wrapping everything in an if statement in order to create valid HTML - validity is a different matter altogether, and an important one.

Re: What’s the Deal With: Django Template Indentation

Kenneth Love — Sat, 03 Jul 2010 12:49:18 -0000

The first example you show, from the books, makes the most sense.

In the UL, when there are items, indent and print them. This is logical.

Your example, though, isn't since it automatically introduces a level of indentation regardless of if there are items or not.

(really the whole thing should be wrapped in an if anyway to prevent an empty UL)

Re: What’s the Deal With: Django Template Indentation

Marcus Whybrow — Sat, 03 Jul 2010 10:51:04 -0000

I agree. I think template code is much more important since that is where you (as the developer) are spending most of your time.

Re: What’s the Deal With: Django Template Indentation

Morpho — Sat, 03 Jul 2010 10:45:41 -0000

Django template code should be easy to read. I think thats most importatnt. If you need proper html indentation use http://djangosnippets.org/s... or firebug

Re: What’s the Deal With: Django Template Indentation

Marcus Whybrow — Sat, 03 Jul 2010 10:38:21 -0000

If we don't care about the HTML, then we should stop sacrificing the templates indentation for no reason.

Re: What’s the Deal With: Django Template Indentation

ksamuel — Sat, 03 Jul 2010 09:42:51 -0000

Who cares ?

If the machine read it, it doesn't matter.

If a human read it, he will use htmltidy or a firefox extension to get a readable output automatically.

It's really not something to waste your time on.

Re: What’s the Deal With: Django Template Indentation

Marcus Whybrow — Sat, 03 Jul 2010 07:37:24 -0000

If it were the case that nobody ever needed to look at the HTML code of a site, we should be just be minifying the whole thing. The fact that we don't (in most cases) suggests that generating legible HTML is somewhat important.

Re: What’s the Deal With: Django Template Indentation

Morpho — Sat, 03 Jul 2010 07:33:26 -0000

ok Nestor, i got your point. i dont have that case very often. but in case i use firebug, edit the parsed dom-tree on-the-fly and copy everything in my django templates. that works best for me.