This is probably a holywarish topic, but nevertheless. In a perfect content mana

Question

This is probably a holywarish topic, but nevertheless.

In a perfect content management system of your dream, would you rather want a templating system that is completely, 100% separate from your code, and uses declarative syntax to produce (X)HTML (such as <your code> -> DOM/XML -> XSLT -> HTML), or would you rather choose a system that lets your code cook HTML fragments, and then runs some template assembly to put these pieces together to output a complete page?

Thanks in advance.

EDIT

To make it probably a bit more clear, I mean that HTML is a declarative 'language', whereas most of the dynamic stuff is done in imperative/functional languages. Templates glue the two together, but the way they do it isn't always clean (as in clean separation of paradigms).

Explanation / Answer

If the popularity of Ruby on Rails, Django and ASP.NET MVC have taught us anything it is that a clean, MVC-style web framework combined with HTML-like templating that has nearly full language access is the way to go. Can developers make bad decisions about where to put formatting code? Sure. But I'd rather take that risk then deal with the necessary hacks and tricks one needs to do in a system with full separation. Tell me again, how does one format a date in XSLT?

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