Embedded HTML tables, shared annotations
Hello zopers, I am using Zope to set up a small intranet, for a (small) clinical lab's self-documentation. This involves encoding as Zope objects, an already existing printed manual (ms word) of clinical analysis offers, to physicians. The thing is a big list with an "inside-out" systematic, by which I mean that maybe 25% of the entries are simplest case and follow a completely regular pattern, while the other entries vary from simple variants or generalizations of that simplest pattern, along different paths of generalization, to complex variations and completely ad hoc entries. With an RDBMS, I'd have had to regularize the data completely and sacrifice some of the information. Zope incites me to consider the challenge of capturing more of the existing data's structure and variations, e.g. users' (and future maintainers') style. Looking for the best of all words, I arrive at the idea to define a set of "method" names, whose results are HTML Tables, that "naturally" embed into each other. Somehow I have a feeling that the logic of such "distributed tabling" can be isolated from HTML, so that a nice and clean query language in terms of partial functions and 2D grid portions ("tableaux") might emerge. Since I am just starting on that hunch, I was wondering if somebody else had already hit on such an intuition and drawn any conclusions from which I could shamelessly profit. Also, these musings reminded me of an old project I had once started, to provide an uniform annotation facility to annotate web pages (using an ad hoc proxy). I abandonned it at the time (it was four or five years ago) because I had discovered that other groups were much more advanced on this, and, if I remember well, the w3c was standardizing such a facility. Then I parted from web work, but (while I did not look for it), I am quite surprised that nothing like it is currently in the hands of web users nowadays. Of course, the commercial drive of the growth of the web, in the meantime, explains it. Advertisement banners overtook the budding niche for users' annotations. But maybe the time is now ripe for the pendulum to swing back. Zope strikes me as a server model that could integrate a uniform shared annotations facility on the pages it publishes. Thoughts, pointers, wish to discuss, anyone ? Regards, Boris Borcic -- "c++ is a contradiction in terms" - Einstein
"30215.gz.uu" wrote:
Hello zopers,
[... ...]
Also, these musings reminded me of an old project I had once started, to provide an uniform annotation facility to annotate web pages (using an ad hoc proxy). I abandonned it at the time (it was four or five years ago) because I had discovered that other groups were much more advanced on this, and, if I remember well, the w3c was standardizing such a facility. Then I parted from web work, but (while I did not look for it), I am quite surprised that nothing like it is currently in the hands of web users nowadays.
[...]
Zope strikes me as a server model that could integrate a uniform shared annotations facility on the pages it publishes. Thoughts, pointers, wish to discuss, anyone ?
I have been using Zope to provide an anotating facility to my department(history), though I can not see what "a server model that could integrate a uniform shared annotations facility on the pages it publishes" is. We are anotating some manuscripts, i.e. traditional texts. The problem is, I can not predetermine to what people attache their anotations. A paragraph, a word, a phrase, a sentence or any combination of that. The HTML 4.0 standart has ID attribute. Hence I gave all the paragraphs and head elements in a "documents(250+ html files)" unique ids. that solved problem partially(if you want, you can have definitely finer resolution). Our anotations are save on MySQL database. Though I have created static links to anotation 'window' for each ID, Now I see creating a javascript function which utilizes ID is better. What is realy wanting is the why to dynamically determine the range to which an anotation will be attached. But THIS seems above the current HTML browsers' capability. You may need some jave applets for GENERAL solution. But for reasonably structured documents, you can have partial(coarse grained, predetermined resolution) yet easy local solution. I guess in business (i.e. not in humanites) area that would be enough. Well, I am too poor at English(or any other European languages) to write easily of my situation. Please let me stop here. I'd like to exchange ideas and solutions further. best regards, LEE Kwan Soo
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30215.gz.uu -
LEE, Kwan Soo