"Seaside encourages the developer to use CSS to describe the visual appearance of a component, but it does not use a templating engine, and encourages developers to programmatically generate meaningful and valid XHTML markup."

...aaaand I click away from the page. A web framework without templates?

Seaside is really made for Web Applications, in that sense it focusses more on giving you good and easy tools to build components, maintain state complex navigation and interaction.

You don't get templates in the sense of XHTML produced by web designers that you annotate afterward with a special markup. Instead, your page's rendering is defined in Smalltalk code. The downside is obvious but the advantage is that you use the same language and facilities (like refactoring tools, separate methods or components) to structure and manage your user interface.

Most web designers don't grok <your_favorite_langauages>, but some limited template languages/tags. A web framework without template doesn't scale in terms of development resource unless you figure out a way to automatically translate a template delivered by a designer to your Smalltalk code.

The idea is more you have the application "naked" without styling and the designer builds the css to style the application. If changes are needed to the html, the designer can ask the developer.

I get that. But the downside is that my front-end developer can't write HTML anymore, which is her primary skill. Instead she now needs to learn smalltalk. All other things being equal, I'll pick a framework that doesn't involve re-training my staff.

You hire someone to write HTML specifically?

The angle that Seaside is going for is that the software will emit the HTML, and the front-end people should be writing CSS and JavaScript to build applications.

Seaside is not a publication focused framework; the goal is to build web applications with it - so the emphasis is different.

Yes, we hire someone to write HTML specifically. We're a large company, and we have a lot of interface to get written in a combination of CSS, JS and HTML. Lots of big companies do it this way.

I think markup generated programmatically is going lack readability and flexibility. I think for anything other than trivially simple interfaces, programmatically generating markup is going to be a bottleneck versus just marking it up and substituting variables. However, these are just opinions. That's why I'm not going to use this framework, it doesn't mean it's not right for other people.

It seems to address several of the issues people may have when starting to work with seaside such as deployment. I find it is weak on persistency and it doesn't seem to talk much about using an SQL database. But then again, it's not bad to focus on what is different either.