SimpleTAL is a stand alone Python implementation of the TAL, TALES and METAL specifications used in Zope to power HTML and XML templates. SimpleTAL is an independent implementation of TAL; there are no dependencies on Zope nor is any of the Zope work re-used.
More here: http://www.owlfish.com/software/simpleTAL/
-- richard: Apart from being independent from Zope, what does it offer? Does it do the i18n stuff? Last time I looked it there was a part of the TAL spec unimplemented (though I don't recall what that was now). How does it compare in terms of speed (TAL is pretty fast).
-- johannes: Well, I was mostly thinking about speed. i18n isn't implemented in the default distribution, but a patch is available: http://webcleaner.sourceforge.net/devel/simpletal.html. I'm not sure whether it's any faster, but it might be worth looking into.
Patches to use the chameleon TAL engine are in roundup 1.4.20 or newer. So SimpleTAL is not really as useful anymore.