zpt/README.md

Zenon Page Templates - JS (ZPT-JS)

# 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](https://zope.readthedocs.io/en/latest/zopebook/index.html) 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, query, 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](https://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Global_Objects/Intl) and [ICU](http://userguide.icu-project.org/formatparse/messages)). 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%: there are some important differences between ZPT-JS and ZPT.

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 (invoking `zpt.context.useOriginalTags()`).

## Installation

**ZPT-JS** is registered as a package on [npm](https://www.npmjs.com/package/zpt). This is the recomended way of downloading it. You can install the latest version of ZPT-JS and its dependencies with the npm CLI command:

```bash
npm install zpt
```

## Tutorial, reference and more
Take a look at [ZPT-JS's home page](https://davidcana.github.io/ZPT-JS/) for more details.

## License
[LGPL](http://www.gnu.org/licenses/lgpl.html)