[ZDP] ZDP todo

[Martijn Pieters]

At 16:22 27/04/99 , Rik Hoekstra wrote:
>The <question_comment> and <answer_comment> look ugly
>but I believe they will rarely be used as shown
>above. The usual way to enter a comment or an answer is
>through the web interface, so contributors will not
>have to deal with all this verbosity.

We talked about this one before.
You can easily make the XML look like this:

<question>
	<value>What's the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe
	and Everything?</value>
	<comment>Well, what is it?</comment>
	<comment>Don't we want to know what the question is first?</comment>
</question>
<answer>
	<value>42</value>
	<comment>42??!!</comment>
	<comment>See, I told you..</comment>
</answer>

Much cleaner... Yes, XML can sometimes seem to contain an awful lot of
seemingly unnessecary tags. But it does make the hierarchy much cleaner and
clearer.

>- Provision for linking to other entries.
>In addition to having a Cut, Past, Copy and otherwise general move
>capabilites to also have a Link capability, which creates a linked_to
>and linked_by reference set (I know, circular, gotta break it somehow)
>allowing you to move things around however you want, but still reference
>them from other places.

They don't neseccarily need to be circular, but it would make it easier for
maintenance.

>III- Different viewing options for the FAQ.
>  - A simple plain one,
>  - a full version that includes comments
>    contributor info etc
>  - a tree version similar to Amos

Using ZTables, this should prove easy.

----

I think that seeing all the proposals, there is still a lot to think
through about the FAQ. Maybe we should just try and build something, and
make an XML DTD afterwards. There seems to be this Topic/Subtopic thing,
for example.

It looks like we are verging on a structure that might best be described
using RDF (http://www.w3.org/RDF/). After all, a FAQ should have a
hierarchical structure, and contains lots and lots of metadata, like
'Author', 'Maintainer', 'Modification date', 'comments', etc. RDF is
perfect for such structures. The Open Directory project (www.dmoz.org, a
sort of Open Yahoo, Open as in Open Source), can be fully described in RDF,
and you can in fact download the database in RDF.



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Martijn Pieters, Web Developer
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