..I think I just got a healthy mental kick in the right dirction by looking at the Rebol site http://www.rebol.com

For example looking at http://www.rebol.com/examples.html

item #1 Fetch a web page and send it as email. [1 line Rebol script] "send luke@rebol.com read http://www.rebol.com"

What would it take to integrate this kind of proweful clarity into Zope.DTML ?

I hadn't looked at Rebol before today. My impression (FWIW): while I'll agree that your example above is exceptionally clear, that clarity also degrades as the logic becomes more complex. This is not to make a judgement on Rebol necessarily - I think that this is an issue in _any_ language or environment. Before you know it, people will have moved beyond: "send luke@rebol.com read http://www.rebol.com" to need: "send luke@rebol.com read http://www.rebol.com but only if he's allowed to see it and only if its sunday and oh yeah convert it to multi-part while you're at it"

From what I saw of Rebol, the end result would be significantly uglier than my contrived example above :) Again, that's not to bash Rebol in any way - I'm certain that the equivalent DTML is just as or even more ugly. Complexity just naturally grows in step with flexibility.

A lot of this really goes back to the root question of "what is DTML really for?", which I won't go into at length (there have been several threads about it lately). I would, however, suggest that in many ways the use of External Methods or Python Methods is the natural and Pythonic way to deal with reducing complexity (at least apparent complexity from the point of view of the DTML user). While there is no equivalent to your send-page example implemented as a simple embedded DTML command, it is pretty easy to hide that complexity behind External Methods or Python Methods that implement those "commands": <dtml-call "send_page_to_someone('luke@rebol.com', 'http://rebol.com')"> I'll be the first to admit that this is not quite as pretty, but it is not unreasonably ugly.

How could Zope use Rebol or a rebol-like python external method to best effect? any ideas?

I don't quite understand this - by this do you mean some kind of object like an external method but that could be written in Rebol? If so, that wouldn't really fix the DTML ugliness problem would it? You'd still have to say something like: <dtml-call "send_page_to_someone('luke@rebol.com', 'http://rebol.com')"> ...even if the actual work was done in a different language wouldn't you? Perhaps I'm missing your point though. Brian Lloyd brian@digicool.com Software Engineer 540.371.6909 Digital Creations http://www.digicool.com