Jerry.Spicklemire@IFLYATA.COM wrote:
Rik has some interesting observations regarding the depth of a present generation browser's "awareness" of the components that make up a Zope rendered html "page", which is to say nearly none. But isn't this exactly what XML solves for us? An XML document, even after browser rendering (not to be confused with the Zope server side composition stage), is still made up of discrete XML objects, and thus selectable, editable, etc.
You are right of course, and I should have said something about this in my mail. In fact, my thoughts were inspired in part by XMLDocument and particularly Martijn Faassen's XMLWidgets product. Where XML is of course the best way for data exchange and arguably should play a role in the mechanism for editing documents, it is currently not sufficient as XML editors have not yet been widely accepted. Therefore we need 'pluggable frontends' for all sorts of wysiwyg (HTML) editors that currently can't handle XML.
The beauty of this concept isn't so much that Zope / Python simply can't do all this by itself, we all know that Zope / Python (Grail?) can do anything short of levitation*. Rather the point is simply that XML is a well accepted, existing standard, and is bound to be supported in popular browsers.
Yep, but not yet. Moreover: zope documents do not currently have a XML representation in the form I propose, though there has been rumours about an XML version of DTML. Things have been conspicuously silent about that point thus far. Rik