A simpler possibilities would be to provide an Java editing applet with syntax highlighting, right click form support and syntax completion that hooked inside Zope management console. So instead of the good old form, let's have a sophisticated html editor embedded in it.
ah..dream on
Ahh, Java. Evolving Point'n'Click to Point'n'Click'n'Wait'n'Groan'n'Scream (and wonder why it behaves differently than you expect?) :) If the community were to come up with something REALLY good, we'd be interested. But there's a lot of difficulty matching the advanced philosphies of Zope (Acquisition, Security, and now ZClass based objects) and DTML (namespaces, syntax, general concepts) with just about any visual editor out there. A _LOT_ of difficulty. It would be a project of some serious effort, and we haven't seen anybody with enough initiative to come up with a plan of tackling this. On the other hand, the new syntax is easier to work into smart (non-visual) editors like Alpha (and Emacs-ish editor on the Mac) with syntax completion and all that. Some tags like the contributed dtml-let tag may have some difficulties in these environments that prefer to help keep code very neat by quoting all attributes (a good thing really), since the dtml-let tag behaves differently (ie, <dtml-let bob=uncle lu="aunt()" billy="'cousin'"> ) And there's always problems with this perrenial favorite (dtml tags inside of HTML tags) -- <tr <dtml-if sequence-index-even>bgcolor="#c0c0c0"</dtml-if>> And, well, a trying-to-be-SGML-complient editor that is doing all these wonderful things to help you (syntax hiliting, completion, dialog boxes with tag attributes) panics and jumps over these. But situations like that aside, the new syntax is significantly easier to work with. And with FTP and WebDAV integration, authoring outside of the management interface is made a little bit easier (but work still needs to be done in this area to help it along). So, the dream lives on... :)