Python Templating For the Web (Random Ideas)

Well it's past midnight and I'm musing about web templating in Python for Tornado or AppEngine.   The thing about most Python templating engines that I notice is...

• There's kind of an obsession with being agnostic about everything.  You can render JSON and XML and whatever else you want with our engine!  When is someone just going to make a really awesome templating engine for the web and not try to be everything to everyone?
  
• The value in a template engine to me is how easy it is to allow the template to include logic that's independent of the controller that's generating it.  For example, you might want a server-side ad manager on every page, but you don't necessarily want to put the code for that in every controller.  Solution?  Some engines call it modules, some call it template tags, but whatever the name there is some type of logic that's independent of the controller.  The problem is that most of these pieces of independent logic are needlessly complicated.  (side note: Django has gotten a bit better about this since I first used it two years ago).
  
• Maybe some better support for lazy-loaded values which are available for all templates... things like static URL, etc.

So it's late and I'm thinking, what if there was a template engine, and I mean one specifically for the web, which represented an HTML document more so as a Python class.  Every root element or element with an ID is a property of the document.  Tags can interact with each other... Maybe this is turning out to be too much of a DOM implementation in Python.  Maybe this is a bad idea.  Or maybe I should try coding up a prototype just to see what it's like.

But it's not quite a DOM.  The DOM is concerned with specific structure, where as we're only concerned with a loose abstract structure.  It doesn't matter of the area where scripts are printed too is in the or right above , what's important is that there is a scripts area which sub-modules can access.

Instead of {% extends "some_html_file.html %}, it could be {% extends templates.master %} where templates.master is a python module.


(15 minutes later)... you know it kind of sounds like I'm trying to re-invent ASP.NET WebForms...