PHP, of course, was designed as a templating language. And over its lifetime, Drupal has iterated over several templating systems striving to improve its capabilities and ease-of-use. However, our experience is almost completely with back-end templating systems (raw PHP, XTemplate, Smarty, PHPTemplate, Twig).

The W3C has introduced a new draft spec, Web Components, that brings templating capabilities directly into the HTML language. Integrating this exciting technology into future versions of Drupal will require a shift in thinking, the design of new libraries and collaboration with other projects.

I do not have all the answers. In fact, I mostly have lots of questions. While we are busy completing Drupal 8, let’s take a short break and discuss the future of front-end development practices using components and templates.