Comment by exasperaited

Right. I didn't use it much on the client side so I am not feeling this particular loss so keenly.

But server side, many years ago I built an entire CMS with pretty arbitrary markup regions that a designer could declare (divs/TDs/spans with custom attributes basically) in XSLT (Sablotron!) with the Perl binding and a customised build of HTML Tidy, wrapped up in an Apache RewriteRule.

So designers could do their thing with dreamweaver or golive, pretty arbitrarily mark up an area that they wanted to be customisable, and my CMS would show edit markers in those locations that popped up a database-backed textarea in a popup.

What started off really simple ended up using Sablotron's URL schemes to allow a main HTML file to be a master template for sub-page templates, merge in some dynamic functionality etc.

And the thing would either work or it wouldn't (if the HTML couldn't be tidied, which was easy enough to catch).

The Perl around the outside changed very rarely; the XSLT stylesheet was fast and evolved quite a lot.