templatesover

TemplatesOver is a term used to describe a philosophy and set of tooling for template-centric content generation. In this approach, templates are primary artifacts that define structure and presentation, while data sources provide content to fill templates at render time. The method can be implemented across languages and platforms and is commonly used in web sites, documentation pipelines, and enterprise reporting.

Key concepts include: templates as reusable units, parameterization through a data context, inheritance or composition to extend templates, macros or partials to compose complex layouts, and a rendering phase that applies data to templates to produce output such as HTML, Markdown, or JSON.

Usage: A typical workflow involves authoring templates in a declarative syntax, defining data schemas, and integrating a rendering engine that maps data to templates to produce output. Authors can reuse a common layout for multiple pages, enabling consistent styling and localization.

Advantages: promotes consistency, reduces duplication, improves maintainability, and enables non-developer authors to contribute by editing templates. It supports versioning of templates and cross-project reuse.

Limitations and challenges: the learning curve for complex templating features, potential performance overhead, debugging difficulties across data-to-template mappings, and the need for robust tooling to manage templates and data schemas.

Status and adoption: TemplatesOver is described in theoretical literature and is not tied to a single standard; several real-world templating ecosystems embody similar ideas under different names.