Questions tagged [template-engine]

A template engine is software that is designed to process templates and content information to produce output documents, for example:

• jinja2
• mako
• genshi
• stringtemplate

Paul Sweatte, in an answer to a now-deleted question, provided the following resources on the evolution of separating content from presentation and insights on the historical evolution of template engines:

The W3 Word Processor Filters page is essential reading that should cover most of the basics. For more details, here some resources on the evolution of separating content from presentation:

• Groff Mission Statement (pdf)
• The Roots of SGML -- A Personal Recollection * Java FAQ * Charles Goldfarb—the Godfather of Markup Languages
• Markup Language Family Tree * Typesetting with Linux
• A Triumph of Simplicity: James Clark on Markup Languages and XML
• Markup and Style: History and Philosophy
• Catalog of compilers, interpreters, and other language tools * Understanding the Taxonomy of Languages: Chapter 8 - Minilanguages
• SGML: In Memory of William W. Tunnicliffe * A Companion to Digital Humanities: Allen H. Renear - Text Encoding
• Drawing inferences on the basis of markup
• Rabbit/duck grammars: a validation method for overlapping structures
• Markup Languages and (Non-) Hierarchies

Markup and typesetting languages are the earliest examples of templating.
Here is the Wikipedia definition:

A markup language is a modern system for annotating a document in a way that is syntactically distinguishable from the text. The idea and terminology evolved from the "marking up" of manuscripts, i.e., the revision instructions by editors, traditionally written with a blue pencil on authors' manuscripts. Examples are typesetting instructions such as those found in troff and LaTeX, or structural markers such as XML tags.

Here is a diagram:

                RUNOFF                      "Generic Coding"                 "Editorial Structure Tags"
           (Jerome Saltzer, 1964)         (William Tunnicliffe, 1967)          (Stanley Rice, pre-1970)
                    |                               |                                     |
                    |                               |                                     |
TeX          roff - nroff - troff                   |-------------------------------------|  (Don Knuth, 1977)   (Josef Osanna, 1973)                   |
                                                   GML
                                            (Charles Goldfarb, 1969)
                                                    |                       SCRIBE
                                                    |                   (Brian Reid, 1980)
                                                    |                          |
                                                    |--------------------------|
                                                  SGML
                                              (Standard, 1980)
                                             |                |
                                             |                |
                                           HTML              XML
                                    (Berners-Lee, 1990)    (Standard, 1998)

As far as web site templating, SSI is the mother of them all.