This article, as well as the "XT Expressions" article, were formerly part of the XT API documentation, but were moved here to provide more visibility for them.

Design Goals

XT is a template language with a few key design goals in mind. Understanding these might help you to understand how XT works and why it does certain things. Primarily these are:

• Familiar and helpful to web designers
• Powerful but with a consistent and simple markup

The first part of the first goal is achieved by basing XT on one of the most popular web technologies out there, XML. XT is an XML language designed to fit inside other XML languages, such as XHTML, and RSS/RDF. This means that web designers already know some of how to write XT markup, they just need a tag reference guide and a few solid articles.

The second part of the first goal is achieved by making sure that XT will cooperate with and be previewable in existing browsers and editors without the need for the XT engine to process the templates. Essentially, an XT template should look stylistically identical whether it is being processed through the XT engine or just being viewed directly in an ordinary browser. You will see throughout the examples how this goal was met.

The second goal was power without a compromise of simplicity. We had to keep in mind that even though XT's audience is comprised of technically and creatively inclined people, these people are less likely to be comfortable C++ as opposed to Photoshop hackers, and so we were careful to gear XT to the appropriate audience without compromising its power and flexibility.

However, the real power in XT lies in the expression language that accompanies it, called XTE. XTE is how XT refers to objects and values within tags. The XT engine itself is merely a recursive descent parser written over PHP's built-in XML functions.

Page 1: Design Goals
Page 2: A Complete Example
Page 3: Command Reference
Page 4: Troubleshooting

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