On Fri, 15 Oct 1999, Andreas Jung wrote:
Editing DTML in a textarea input is very annoying. Will there be a better solution in the future of Zope ?
Here part of a pipe dream I had recently: Create a Product called 'Forms'. It lets you build forms using various subobjects. eg. You would create a 'form', put inside it a 'button', and maybe a 'fieldset' which contains a load of 'radios'. You get the picture. It would be coded as DTML tags, probably one for each of the existing HTML form tags. What is interesting, is that the rendering of the forms doesn't have to be boring HTML, although it will default to that. For instance, I might set attributes that enable client side type checking in javascript, or selectivly enable/disable form elements. I might also, depending on the settings in a a cookie, run a Java applet (jpython anyone?) for nicer editing. This Java applet would start just doing syntax highlighting, but could then be extended to include editing mode (vi, emacs, Windows) depending on a cookie, client side DTML syntax checking, conversion of <!--#dtml tags to <dtml- tags, whatever. Once this basic framework is setup, it is then a case of rebuilding the DTML forms used by the Zope management interface to use the new Forms product. Suddenly, you have a management interface that is still usable with Lynx, but also provides an all-singing-all-dancing development environment if your brower is JavaScript 1.1 and JDK 1.1 compliant. <dtml-form action='gohere'> <dtml-fieldset> <dtml-textarea type=dtml name=text> </dtml-fieldset> <dtml-input type=submit name=submit value=submit> </dtml-form> Hazy section that probably won't work well: If all this is successful, add an attribute to DTML methods and documents to 'use smart forms'. If set, you just use standard HTML form tags in the edit windows and it actually stored as dtml-form tags. This is were it got all hazy, as external editors of which I know little start getting in the way :-) It would be nice if someone could create a HTML document in Claris home page, add 'type=html' to the textarea element, and when it is displayed from the Zope site, they get a nice GUI HTML editor embedded in their web page instead of their boring textarea. ___ // Zen (alias Stuart Bishop) Work: zen@cs.rmit.edu.au // E N Senior Systems Alchemist Play: zen@shangri-la.dropbear.id.au //__ Computer Science, RMIT WWW: http://www.cs.rmit.edu.au/~zen