Extensions

ZPT-specific Behaviors

The behavior of Zope Page Templates is almost completely described by the TAL, TALES, and METAL specifications. ZPTs do, however, have a few additional features that are not described in the standards.

HTML Support Features

When the content-type of a Page Template is set to text/html, Zope processes the template somewhat differently than with any other content-type. As mentioned under TAL Namespace, HTML documents are not required to declare namespaces, and are provided with tal and metal namespaces by default.

HTML documents are parsed using a non-XML parser that is somewhat more forgiving of malformed markup. In particular, elements that are often written without closing tags, such as paragraphs and list items, are not treated as errors when written that way, unless they are statement elements. This laxity can cause a confusing error in at least one case; a <div> element is block-level, and therefore technically not allowed to be nested in a <p> element, so it will cause the paragraph to be implicitly closed. The closing </p> tag will then cause a NestingError, since it is not matched up with the opening tag. The solution is to use <span> instead.

Unclosed statement elements are always treated as errors, so as not to cause subtle errors by trying to infer where the element ends. Elements which normally do not have closing tags in HTML, such as image and input elements, are not required to have a closing tag, or to use the XHTML <tag /> form.

Certain boolean attributes, such as checked and selected, are treated differently by tal:attributes. The value is treated as true or false (as defined by tal:condition). The attribute is set to attr="attr" in the true case and omitted otherwise. If the value is default, then it is treated as true if the attribute already exists, and false if it does not. For example, each of the following lines:

<input type="checkbox" checked tal:attributes="checked default">
<input type="checkbox" tal:attributes="checked string:yes">
<input type="checkbox" tal:attributes="checked python:42">

will render as:

<input type="checkbox" checked="checked">

while each of these:

<input type="checkbox" tal:attributes="checked default">
<input type="checkbox" tal:attributes="checked string:">
<input type="checkbox" tal:attributes="checked nothing">

will render as:

<input type="checkbox">

This works correctly in all browsers in which it has been tested.