After some more pondering, I think we will need to add in a tag to the XML files that simply causes HTML from another file to be inserted. This will clean up stuff a bit. Something like:

<insertfile name="foo.html"/>

This however, will not allow substitution in the html file, which gets us back to the point of using XML for templating. This may not be a large issue at all, but then again...

I'm also completely unhappy with the stuff I implemented two days ago, as it won't really allow adding non-standard modules to mod_virgule, which was kind of the point I started out with. Basically, the system needs to allow appending or prepending functions to handle XML tags. This will allow hooking things in from other .so files or whatever. Then we can add in a modules/ directory into the database and load in anything that is sitting there when advogato initializes. The second attempt is always better.