<i> I personally think there's something harsher required. I actually think (and I guess its Don's call) that a large percentage of this toolkit should be dumped/binned immediately, if for no better reason than for clarity.</i>
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I've struggled with this myself. The problem is that even the packages that are poorly written work well enough not to be totally useless. So my own thinking has been that these packages are OK as stop-gap measures but need to be heavily modified or rewritten as a top priority.
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<i> By way of example I think the forms system is a good example of this. There's a functional templating method building up in the tcl/adp approach and this should be extended. Then there's a forms based interface for generating forms that have no inherent relation to the templating system and not only that produce pretty crappy looking items of limited value given that most commercial web applications get highly customised.</i>
<p>I'd disagree about the forms package, actually. I hate the default "two shades of blue" template and have considered asking folks if they'd mind just having the default being good old "black ink on white paper". But ... you can template forms yourself, too.
<p>And the forms system gives much improved error messages if used properly, i.e. embedded in the form. Much better than the "please hit the back button and, oh, try not to screw up this time, OK?" error page you get from ad_page_contract.
<p>We've had a discussion on the forms builder in the design forum and the consensus then seemed to be that we needed to greatly improve integration with the rest of the toolkit (same is true of the templating system in general). I'd like to be able to build self-submitting form handling pages with an ad_page_contract-style syntax (there's no reason we can't parse form element names, types, default values, etc and generate the elements directly rather than force folks to issue a long string of "form element" calls).
<p>And of course I'd like the full ad_page_contract-style feature set, with checks for bogus HTML (or the ability to refuse HTML), signing and verification, etc ...
<p>But I personally don't think we should dump it. I think we should fix it ...
