What is ZPT-JS
Zenon Page Templates - JS (ZPT-JS) is a Javascript API that makes it easy to modify the DOM of a HTML document with no Javascript programming, using only some custom attributes. ZPT-JS is a javascript implementation of Zope Page Templates (ZPT). It is not a fully compliant implementation: there are some differences. Take a look at Zope2 book to learn about Zope Page Templates.
Core features of ZPT-JS are:
- Easy to learn; clean, simple and consistent syntax.
- A rich and powerful group of expressions available (string, Jquery, logical, math, arrays, lists, ranges, function, method expressions...).
- Don't break HTML! The HTML documents using ZPT-JS are valid HTML documents.
- Makes it easy to designers maintain pages without having to abandon their tools.
- Internal macro support; external asynchronous macro loading support.
- I18n and L10n support using standards Intl and ICU. External asynchronous i18n files loading support.
ZPT-JS and ZPT: similar but not equal
ZPT-JS is based on ZPT but it does not implement it at 100%.
Using ZPT we have:
- the ZPT template (a HTML file with the ZPT tags inside)
- the data
- the final HTML file (the ZPT template combined with the data)
Using ZPT-JS:
- the ZPT template (a HTML file with the ZPT tags inside)
- the data
- the final HTML file is the ZPT template! The DOM of the HTML page is modified depending on the tags in the ZPT template.
A main goal of ZPT-JS is not to break a valid HTML document. So, as HTML5 allows, instead of using TAL attributes ZPT-JS uses data attributes. This way tal:content attribute is replaced by data-content. However, ZPT-JS also supports standard TAL attributes (setting a configuration option).