Comparing Markup to Kid

The template engine in Markup was heavily inspired by Kid (​http://kid-templating.org).

Common concepts and features:

• The same basic set of directives (excluding py:extends and py:layout)
• Inline expressions using the ${expr} (or just $expr) syntax.
• Expressions are real Python code, not some “crippled” mini language.
• Stream-based processing model making heavy use of Python generators.
• Different serialization methods, for example to produce XML or HTML output.

Differences include:

• No generation of Python code for a template; the template is executed directly.
• No support for <?python ?> processing instructions
• Expressions are evaluated in a more flexible manner, meaning you can use e.g. dotted notation to access items in a dictionary, and the other way around (see the markup.eval module)
• Proper scoping of variables. Names do not leak into outer scopes.
• Use of XInclude and match templates instead of Kid's py:extends / py:layout directives
• py:match directives use (basic) XPath expressions to match against input nodes, making match templates more powerful while keeping the syntax simple (see the markup.path module)
• Additional directives py:choose / py:when / py:otherwise to better support multi-branch conditionals (aka if, else if, else).
• It is possible to include markup that is not well-formed in the output (which you may need to do ​some ​cases). And if you need to include bad HTML markup but would like to still produce valid output, Markup provides a HTML-sanitizing stream filter.
• Real (thread-safe) search path support
• No dependency on ElementTree (due to the lack of position reporting)
• The original location of parse events is kept throughout the processing pipeline, so that errors can be tracked back to a specific line/column in the template file

---

See also: MarkupFaq, MarkupPerformance