Yes, the master template script handling such things needs to do some error checking. Indeed that's just one more argument supporting the notion of pushing common document elements up to the relevant master rather than have each page handle them as is done today.
Is anyone involved in this thread interested in sitting down to write an informal proposal for what page elements should be treated as properties to push up to the master when we clean things up? Header, context bar, footer ... what else?
At one point I think there was some stuff floating around the aD site on this subject, in fact IIRC (though I may not!) it was part of the original discussions on templating. I was actually surprised to see 4.x packages building their page elements explicitly because I thought that the plan was to use the templating system much as we're talking about here.
But I may be wrong, I may've been hallucinating.
