-----Original Message----- From: Paul Everitt [mailto:paul@digicool.com] Sent: Friday, September 17, 1999 9:08 AM To: Rik Hoekstra Cc: zope@zope.org Subject: [Zope] Re: [ZDP] Wysiwyg and the merits of a webinterface - some considerations

[I removed the ZDP from the email, as most ZDP people are on the zope list.]

Rik Hoekstra wrote:

...

Once in a while the subject of wysiwyg comes up on the list, as it did in the last few days. TO summarize the discussion as I understand it: The main problem is that people want a wysiwyg front end for their Zope

Perhaps there's a farther step backwards. The following people want the following things:

And now for a completely different perspective...

1) Some need to put the simplest possible tool in their casual users' hands, such as Netscape Composer.

I think the 'simplest possible tool' is a textarea. Composer falls a bit short of simple, it's quite far along in the stupid catagory however.

2) Content managers need a very productive environment for managing content, including lite DTML scripting.

I agree about managing content, but what has that to do with DTML scripting? WebDAV and FTP can 'manage' content, when you start writing DTML to *programatically* manage your content, you're doing something different.

3) Developers need a productive environment for manipulating the object model, working with relational databases, debugging problems, etc.

I agree.

I posit that wysiwyg is definately the road for the first audience. The second audience is firmly split between those that want wysiwyg (Dreamweaver) and those that want to see the tags. The third audience almost uniformly shuns wysiwyg.

I think the third doesn't shun it, but embraces it knowing that their choice of tool comes at a cost. Emacs may have a gazzilion cryptic keybindings, and it may not be your-grandmothers-editor, but what *I* see in emacs is definatly what I get. It just ain't pretty.

Even worse, the second and third audience only cares about one tool: the one that they have already learned.

Yes. I've never used and allways avoided the higher end 'design' tools, for probably the same reason that those tools users avoid emacs.

...

The only issue at the moment is that the current management interface (while it is a pleasure to work with for developers) is not at all useful for non-developers.

And should be improved. This is an area *ripe* for community involvment and contribution, and it suprises me that no one has taken a stab at this, considering the state of the managment interface.

...

Instead I would plea for the development of a toolkit for end user web-based editing environments, as I believe many of us are developing them at the moment. Is anyone interested? Ideas? Comments?

There is an excellent remote managment toolkit written in python allready, ZPublisher.Client. Merging this with a python tool would be easy, but other tools? Probably not possible unless they're open sourced, and at that point it's not trivial. -Michel