jstirrell

Sort of. I absolutely love Clojure myself and use it anytime I have the slightest excuse to, but I really feel one of its major shortcomings is the lack of a good templating library. Hiccup is really clean and concise, but it's just not a practical real-world way to handle presentation of a website unless you want everyone writing html to know Clojure.

Enlive and Fleet are other options and I've briefly explored both at certain points, but I personally just found them both unwieldy and unnatural, with other disadvantages as well. I'm sure they suit the needs of some people but I dismissed them before I got past the minimal learning curve.

The same goes for StringTemplate. It seems really cool and everything, but I just don't want to have to learn (and use half the time) a whole new different syntax just to stick dynamic strings in a page.

PHP just makes it so damn easy that it's hard for me to pass up when it comes to churning out webpages.

I've used smarty (version 3 RC) for a recent project and I have to say I'm very pleased with it. Short tags are bad. They are going to be deprecated in PHP6, and they senselessly take away a little of your application's compatibility across all servers.

I don't understand all the hate against Smarty. How would the "PHP is already a templating language" argument explain the rise of all these PHP frameworks we have no, almost all of which contain some means of templating.

Smarty allows me to not have to worry about boring presentation layer crap (ie htmlentities) without having to commit to a large framework. Plus its syntax is pretty nice.

I'm pretty damn color blind, but luckily I've never experienced a website colored in such a way that it's been a major inconvenience. I do frequently hear misconceptions about color blindness though ("so you see in black and white?").