[development] Node Rendering Debate

[Earl Miles]

Darrel O'Pry wrote:
> Much of which the renderingAPI can accomplish. There are some really
> cool things in CCK such as field groups that provide a basic
> demonstration of how the layout can be manipulated through a UI, and
> CCK's handlers which can be translated to the renderAPI via the #theme
> or as a custom element type. 
> 
> Rendering more content using drupal_render give us more access to
> manipulate the output through _alter and #whatever callbacks we choose
> to create in the rendering pipeline. The problem with drupal_render
> currently is we're limiting it to generating node bodies. This is a
> highly nestable API... I'm not sure why we aren't rendering pages using
> this as a starting point and having new renderAPI element type like
> 'page', 'section', 'block', 'container', 'node'... 

What's interesting is that in my vision, CCK's UI basically goes away, replaced 
by a more global one. CCK just ends up adding stuff to that UI.

And I still have my doubts that the drupal_render() stuff will be transparent 
enough for themers to use. I worry, very strongly, that this path is going to 
make it so that only developers can theme nodes.