This documentation provides an overview of what template processing is, what TT3 templates look like, and how you can get started processing them.
This documentation is not even a rough draft yet. It's not even a rough draft of what the rough draft might look like.
TODO: more general intro to templates, aka form letters, etc., like we have in the Badger book. Make no technical assumptions until we've had a chance to explain the basics.
Templates are text documents with embedded tags that instruct the template processor to perform some action. Here's the archetypal "Hello World" template:
Hello World
Ok, it's not much of a template but it illustrates the point - templates
generate text by default. You don't need to type print, for example,
to make it output anything.
Here's a slightly more useful template:
Hello [% name %]
This template has a chunk of plain text ('Hello ') followed by a tag
which outputs the value of the name variable ('[% name %]').
TT3 can embed any number of different tags in a template document. Each tag can implement it's own syntax, semantics, grammar, etc., effectively allowing you to embed several different languages into the same template.
As scary as that sounds, the practical reality is more pragmatic. The default set of tags in TT3 templates implement more-or-less the same core language. The difference lies in the keywords that different tags support, when the tags are evaluated (at compile time or run time), or their tokenising behaviour.
That all sounds rather complicated, but a few examples should illustrate the different template tags.
[TODO: no scratch that, go and look at this separate manual page instead]
More blurb on how a template is considered to be a list of "chunks", which are really all just expressions. Also might want to talk about tokens, e.g. that denote tag start/end.
Andy Wardley http://wardley.org/
Copyright (C) 1996-2009 Andy Wardley. All Rights Reserved.
This module is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself.
You may now like to read Template::TT3::Manual::Tags to learn more about the different kind of tags that can be embedded into templates and what they do.