On Fri, Sep 15, 2000 at 08:21:21AM -0400, Paul Everitt wrote:
I'm surprised that no one responded to this. (Or maybe people did and our continual email server problems have lost it.)
Me too.
I'd like to congratulate Hiperlogica, because they have (ding ding ding) the _right answer_! :^)
Thank you :-) We feel good about this answer too.
Seriously, we at Digital Creations have been quietly formulating a proposal on this since Amos put up the template proposal in dev.zope.org. I floated some trial balloons at EuroZope and it's clear there's some consensus.
Glad to know that.
Our "XHTML Templates Proposal" is at:
http://dev.zope.org/Wikis/DevSite/Proposals/XHTMLTemplatesProposal
It is not linked on the Proposals FrontPage... -- Anyway, at least for HiperDOM I feel comfortable with the word "template" because that's what it is about. The two primary motivations for the design are: * You can create the layout with any XML-compliant editor; if the template is xHTML, you can use a XHTML-compliant WYSIWYG tool. Or, thanks to the modern XML technology, you can use a WYSIWYG HTML tool and pass it trough a SGML->XML filter to get xHTML. Using specialized webdesigners with Zope project has been one of the biggest pains in Zope development; we have to take the sometimes ugly code generated by the tools they use, usually clean it up, then insert the DTML tags in it. Making changes to the design is a nightmare. * The template looks like the rendered page; if you don't want to fire up Zope, or if the application logic is not yet finished, you can preview the layout by simply loading the template in a browser. These goals are similar, but not identical to the ones in the proposal. Still, some parts of the proposal felt like extracted rigth out of my mind :-) I don't feel good about calling the layers "document" and "view" or "presentation" and "data" because the "view" is not strictly presentation code; invariant (static) parts shared by all pages rendered with that template can be in the template. As much as we all like to talk about "Web Applications", this is not exactly like "normal" application design, where you can draw a clear line between presentation and data (or model/view). -- The only thing I _don't_ feel good about this kind of template is that, in practice, we will probably lose the benefits of things like <dtml-var standard_html_header> - meaning, when you want to change the header of your site, you'll have to edit all your templates. Of course a site where this is a problem still _can_ use "includes" like standard_html_header, but I believe most won't. []s, |alo +---- -- Hack and Roll ( http://www.hackandroll.org ) News for, uh, whatever it is that we are. http://zope.gf.com.br/lalo mailto:lalo@hackandroll.org pgp key: http://zope.gf.com.br/lalo/pessoal/pgp Brazil of Darkness (RPG) --- http://zope.gf.com.br/BroDar