Chapter 3. Templates

In the previous chapter, you may have noticed something peculiar in how we returned the text in our example views. Namely, the HTML was hard-coded directly in our Python code, like this:

def current_datetime(request): 
    now = datetime.datetime.now() 
    html = "It is now %s." % now 
    return HttpResponse(html) 

Although this technique was convenient for the purpose of explaining how views work, it's not a good idea to hard-code HTML directly into your views. Here's why:

• Any change to the design of the page requires a change to the Python code. The design of a site tends to change far more frequently than the underlying Python code, so it would be convenient if the design could change without needing to modify the Python code.

• This is only a very simple example. A common webpage template has hundreds of lines of HTML and scripts. Untangling and troubleshooting program code from this mess is a nightmare (cough-PHP-cough).

• Writing Python code and designing...