Comparing Genshi to Kid

The XML-based template engine in Genshi 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.
• 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 genshi.template.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 Using XPath in Genshi)
• 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 in ​some ​cases). And if you need to include bad HTML markup but would like to still produce valid output, Genshi 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

Other minor syntactic changes (useful when converting):

• The XML Namespace used is http://genshi.edgewall.org/, not http://purl.org/kid/ns#
• py:attrs takes a dictionary argument or list of tuples but doesn't support keyword arguments in the form name=value

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See also: GenshiFaq, GenshiPerformance, Documentation