TAL as it was implemented for ZOPE was a total abortion (especially when they threw in other crap to make up for its gaping weaknesses like TALES, METAL, and those goofy expression what were not anything like any other language, plus "acquisition" which was a terrible and useless approach to scoping). The ZOPE stack's approach to templating and scoping and components and their entire way of thinking about it was totally demented and wrong headed. I used it a lot in my wild and crazy ZOPE days, and I hated it then and won't ever go back.

On the other hand, there are other similar attribute based xml templating languages that are much much better, because they didn't try to reinvent the wheel out of tapioca and rusty iron filings, but instead they simply acted as a thin veneer over Python, so everything you knew about and could do in Python applied without any distortion or unnecessarily creative reinterpretation.

Specifically, TurboGears used the "Kid" templating language, the next generation of which was re-implemented as "Genshi". I have used both extensively, and although they do have some problems and limitations (many of which Genshi addressed), I really like them a lot, and they are easy to use and think about, and not so full of surprises and disappointments as the horrible stuff from ZOPE that they (distantly) descended from. I've used Kid and then Genshi in large template-heavy projects over many years, and I still use Genshi and like it. It is actually quite elegant and minimalistic, and super easy to learn.

http://genshi.edgewall.org/

Genshi operates on pure clean XML internally, has real Python loops, conditionals, variables, functions, parameter passing and extensibility, and has plug-in serializers for various formats like XML, XHTML and HTML5, that know about all the formatting rules and conventions and browser quirks and superstitions like <BR />, and never produce incorrectly quoted or formatted content. You can also use it to product plain text as well as markup.