Thoughts on templating

Thoughts on templating

Goals

• Output of the design process can be reused in the development process
• Changes made to the HTML after the initial design process are automatically reflected in the development environment
• As much based on standards as possible to make the solutions future proof
• A solution for design time templating: Changes made to a component/widget in one central place are reflected in all instances of the component automatically
• A solution for run time templating: The ability to populate variable or repeating components based on a separate data set. This data set could be a stub during the design process (For instance in json format) or a real service in a production environment
• Designer friendly

Some inspiration could be drawn from the W3C Web components standard. The standard is in draft and very new so probably not useful today in a production environment. Yet it's concepts cover most designers' needs and easy to learn.

The nice goodies from Web components through a designer's eye:

• Component templates in separate files
• HTML based syntax for instantiating components with custom tags
• Option settings per instance

Component templates in separate files

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Option settings per instance

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HTML based syntax

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