From: "Christopher G. Petrilli" <petrilli@amber.org> My goal was to provide an obviously incomplete fix to the current problem of editing in HTML editors, which is what sparked this. The fix I proposed fixes that. Once I have a proper XML editor with full XSL support, it'll be easier to hypothesise about solutions, but until then, it's all hand waving.
The editing-in-HTML-editors will always be a problem with the current syntax, in my opinion, because (real code here, and code i'm not at all ashamed to have written): <TD><SELECT NAME="category"> <!--#in "Categories(active=1)"--> <OPTION VALUE="<!--#var label-->" <!--#if "(REQUEST.has_key('category') and category==label)"-->SELECTED<!--#/if-->
<!--#var label--></OPTION> <!--#/in--> </SELECT></TD>
will give just about any editor a headache. Cyberstudio, at a minimum, moves the comment tags outside of the <SELECT> statements. Dreamweaver might handle this a little better, but as you drag and drop the visual representation around it tends to get out of sync. This same problem hangs around ASP code with only one real visual editor existing (Drumbeat) - and most drumbeat generated sites I've been too have been as much fun as a root canal in slow motion. Since ColdFusion uses 'regular' tags, it's relatively easy to extend editors to handle them, albeit it usually in a limited fashion. And WebObjects, which introduces only one special tag into the HTML environment, requires another parser to handled the accompanying .wod file to be visual (.wod being full of statements similar to HTMLGen instances.) I don't even know what else is out there. I think Vignette's StoryServer can be used with DreamWeaver in the initial stages of design, but once StoryServers code starts getting into the HTML code they advise not going visual anymore (i think StoryServer uses *twitch* TCL in their pages). In any case, this is a very meaty problem - and not just for Zope. (or in other words "ohhhhh, it's so much worse than you think" :) stared-down-this-barrel-just-enough-times-to-even-copy-this-tired-sig'ly yrs, --jPS - - / jeffrey@Digicool.com - http://www.digicool.com/