new user's first impressions and a wish

[todd fahrner <tf...@collab.net>]

After working for years with XSSI, I was exposed to WebMacro for the 
first time a few weeks ago, and now to Velocity. The first and most 
persistent thing I miss about XSSI syntax is that it's wrapped in SGML 
comments, while neither WM nor VM are. This militates against the use of 
markup-oriented processing tools such as validating parsers, HTML Tidy, 
etc., which naturally choke on the naked logic.

I'm tasked with recoding a very large body of vm files to assure that 
the output is valid xhtml (specifically 
<http://www.collab.net/dtds/collabnet_transitional_10.dtd>), and the 
inapplicability of markup-oriented tools to the vm source is slowing 
things down considerably. I'm about to cook up pre- and post-processing 
scripts to wrap/unwrap the vm in comments, but expect plenty of 
whitespace-related "gotchas" ahead. Has anybody done similar?

Was a markup-friendly syntax (comments or straight up xml) considered 
during the design phase of Velocity?