-----Original Message----- From: Rik Hoekstra [mailto:fghoekstra@cit10.wsd.leidenuniv.nl] Sent: Friday, September 24, 1999 11:55 AM To: Jay, Dylan Subject: RE: [Zope-dev] Barriers and wysiwyg [Martijn Pieters:]
Zope was designed for Web Application Developers, not designers. The documentation follows this design. I actually feel that dummies should stay away from Zope. Frontpage is for dummies.
[Jay Dylan]
I disagree. I believe the ideal place Zope could end up is as being something that was as simple to use as frontpage and as powerful as ... well as it already is. I'm not saying that the "simpler" users should be able to as powerfull things as "programmer" type users can but it should not be unaccessable to them. They should be able to edit and add basic documents.
Michael Bernstein added in another post that as a designer he needs to work visually, which is a good point. And he adds another crucial remark : in web building we wear many hats at the same time. And most application servers lump all these roles together, while Zope separates them. Many have remarked that this is the problem of communication between Zope and editors: they were made with a different mindset. Uing Dreamweaver or Frontpage (light) or whatever it is quite possible to add plain html pages and design them anyway you want. You can even manage them through the web.* Or to once more cite Jon Udell on byte.com : "It is completely feasible for a novice to download Zope, install it, and build a simple site -- even one that leverages the object hierarchy to factor out repetitive pieces -- without writing any code. And the result is 100% Web-manageable." The point is of course, that you usually do not want this. You want people who do pure and simple content management to add content, not to change layout. Much less to go programming DTML. This is what makes editing a ZOpe site difficult: once you defined behaviour (dtml methods/products) and layout, you want content managers to add content. The problem is that people want to see what they get. I think Paul's Mozilla approach is very promising in this respect. It may even turn out to be an incredible site management tool. But this will require a _lot_ of work. On the other hand I question once more whether the textarea is such a bad idea. It is especially useful if you want to have content managers also manage parts of a site, without them controlling the user interface. By contolling a site I mean adding and editing content and users, and folders and news and all sorts of other things that are not possible to add from a wysiwyg editor, which is after all just an editor... In this case (and I believe it is quite common, if only for all sorts of intranet like activities) even if you could use a wysiwyg editor, site management for dummies would still be a fragmented (and bewildering) experience. I find it most remarkable that the packages I know of (mostly web learning environments - but they are good examples: blackboard, webCT, TeleTOP etc, etc) that are meant for this type of site building and maintenance do exactly this: they keep everything browser based. I looked into the documentation of Oracle WebDB today and it is exactly what they do (including the textarea) and what they bring forward as a strong point of their product. Just one citation from their brochure:
Oracle WebDB is HTML-based. All that's needed on the client side to build and run WebDB applications and web sites is a web browser such as Netscape Navigator or Microsoft Internet Explorer. WebDB users benefit from quick installation, distributed deployment, and a familiar interface.[...] All WebDB site maintenance tools are included within the site itself. There's no need to leave the site or learn how to use another product. To add content, authorized users simply navigate to where they want to add it, switch to Edit Mode, and use the simple interface provided."
The only thing is, to repeat myself, that currently there is no such standard tool for Zope. I'm afraid some of the DC folks took this as a criticism - it was not meant like that. I do not even like wysiwyg for the most part (except for designing in which case they are indispensible). I think the Zope interfaces (from http to xml-rpc) are excellent and abundant. They are just not for dummies. What we need is a dummy web interface builder toolkit. Rik * Someone (I forgot who, but if necessary I can retrieve the URL) hacked up a perl clone of the Frontpage extensions so if necessary this should be doable for Zope as well I think. The question is just who would want that - Frontpage is terrible.