At 6:40 am -0400 21/7/99, Paul Everitt wrote:
I've used Amos' work a bit, so I can describe some neat things about it.
Many thanks Paul,
As for editing, well, it's pretty neat. You can edit the XML Document as a whole, or you can go to a specific element (by, what else, adding /manage to it) and get a TEXTAREA to edit it. Surprisingly, the element attributes (right jargon?) show up as editable Zope properties. Let's say you go to an element and add a property. When you look at the XML, an attribute has been added to the element.
This is starting to get *very* nice. Would I be able to add/delete a specific element from a folder and be able to export the resultant structure in an XML format? Would the URL to get to the <author> element in this XML document <?xml version="1.0" ?> <library> <book size="folio" pages="200"> <title>The art of War</title> <author>Sun Tzu</author> </book> <book> .... </book> </library> look like ... /library/book/author ? what would you do about multiple authors?
What's particularly nice about this is that it doesn't version the entire XML text, only the Zope representation of the element. This naturally means that the cache manager can swap out the elements that aren't being used.
Amos created a "slide show" demo for me to replace my clumsy way of doing presentations. I can now write the slide show material as one big XML document. The body is still written as structured text and an attribute signals its format. The elements acquire a document that uses DTML to render the contents into HTML, including previous and next buttons. I can also do conditions to see if, for instance, a slide has been marked private. Needless to say, I can have multiple presentations of the same data, or even ship the XML back in toto to IE5 or Mozilla with a style sheet.
I like the idea of using a document to render the contents into HTML. One thing that we'd want to do (eventually) is to render the contents of a succession of elements into RTF. Whoops, it seems like your last sentence answers my question about exporting into a XML document.
I very, very much like how Amos has done this in a way that reinforces the good things about Zope rather than a me-too approach. URLs march into the tree of an XML document. Try that with other stuff.
This 'tree-marching', it wouldn't be XPointer based would it?, that would make for interesting URLs!
Elements can acquire a management screen and different templates for rendering. Try that with other stuff.
:) another question answered!
I'm particularly excited with the prospect of hooking up the Catalog and indexing elements individually, as far as I know there aren't any open source indexing systems for XML yet. At the same time, Cathi Davey here has taken steps to give Zope objects a DOM interface. One particularly interesting use of this is to use XQL as a query language for Zope.
This is getting really freaky - when I first looked at getting our material online in a sensible fashion (ie using XML), I thought about using XQL as a query engine, but it was too beta and only available in Perl.
In closing, there is now a bunch of stuff in Zope that provides a basis for people to come up with interesting ideas and extensions. It ought to be exciting!
Exciting? this sounds a *lot* more than that Paul - I know what I'll be doing this weekend.. Whew! tone. ------ Dr Tony McDonald, FMCC, Networked Learning Environments Project http://nle.ncl.ac.uk/ The Medical School, Newcastle University Tel: +44 191 222 5888 Fingerprint: 3450 876D FA41 B926 D3DD F8C3 F2D0 C3B9 8B38 18A2