Over on PHPComplete.com this morning, there's a new posting - and the great template battle raging on.

The great template debate rages on, and discussions of what makes a good templating language surfaces. This was my contribution to the thread. Hey, sometimes I amaze even myself. Harry was nice enough to post it to the Template Pattern wiki that covers templating engines in general. [...] I put together the following list not only because I felt the discussion needed something to build on, but because it's important that future template engine designers have some guidelines to follow up with. Whether you choose to use Smarty, create your own, use XSLT, or whatever, it doesn't matter. In the end, these are the criteria I use in looking at template engines, and maybe you could use this as well.

He goes on to talk about the different things that a good templating system should accomplish and adhere to. And, in the end, his conclusion is that there's really not any template engine that currently conforms to all of these criteria...