[Zope-CMF] Compound elements

[Erik Lange]

Hi :)

Jon, is what you're looking for not this; a way to incorporate compound
documents in a new compositions, without re-composing the components in the
originally compound documents ?

I know this sounds more like an alcohol-test than anything else, so I can
imagine if it's been hard to explain... I take this quite seriously
though... correct me if I've misunderstood your quest ;-)

Working with multimeidia, our composited documents are e.g. a movie
masterfile with burned-in sub-titles. Now, if we can include textfiles with
various langauge-versions of the subtitles, along with such a masterfile, we
can let the user select his or her preffered subtitling langauge (This is a
well known technique in DVD-authoring)... BUT - we want the movie's internal
"skin-selection" to be seperated from whatever control the viewer might have
or not, over the "Cinema" where the movie is presented to the user.

I believe this scenario can be transferred directly to written documents,
were an author might want to present his work in a certain way, as well as
it gets wrapped in a portals header/footer/(STYLE)...

For media content we're at the moment looking at Advanced Authoring Format
(AAF) but I would like to hear if anybody else have other ideas or knows of
other formats/techniques that solves this.

Introduction to AAF - IMHO even if you're not into media, the concept is
fascinating:
http://industryclick.com/magazinearticle.asp?magazineid=127&releaseid=8591&m
agazinearticleid=121669&SiteID=15

Greetings,
Erik Lange


> -----Original Message-----
> From: zope-cmf-admin@zope.org [mailto:zope-cmf-admin@zope.org]On Behalf
> Of Jon Edwards
> Sent: Monday, October 15, 2001 3:36 PM
> To: Seb Bacon
> Cc: Zope-Cmf
> Subject: RE: [Zope-CMF] Compound elements
>
>
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: Seb Bacon [mailto:seb@jamkit.com]
>
> > A good question.  As I understand it, your solution is to provide a
> > set of structural layouts, into which content components can be placed
> > at will.  The page authoring process goes:
> >
> >  - pick a layout (top bar, left nav, main area)
> >  - select content for each layout component (text widget -> top bar,
> >    image -> main area)
> >  - edit content components
>
> Yea, sorta! I've changed it now so that when a "normal" user adds
> a page, it
> just inherits the same page-layout settings from higher up the hierarchy -
> only high-level users can change the page-layout settings locally...
> hopefully that gives the best of both worlds ;-)
>
> But the point I was (clumsily) trying to make is that you treat a
> "compound
> document" as the "content" part of the page - the bit in the middle, not
> including the surrounding headers, footers, navbars, etc. - which I think
> was also the idea behind the Composite Proposal. The benefit being,
> hopefully, that if everyone uses that approach, there will be a
> possibility
> to interchange between different systems?
>
> > I think the best way of thinking about what a templating system should
> > be capable of TTW is to realise that there are two distinct roles
> > here: one is the template developer, the other is the site author.
> > In our situation, we are the site developers, and the clients are the
> > site authors, and we are happy keeping things that way.
>
> True, but I think there is also a halfway-house for small organisations,
> where they can select an existing template, then add their logo, customise
> colours, fonts etc... a bit like the "Homepage Builders" that many ISPs
> offer (but with less animated GIFs! ;-)
>
> > On the other hand, a TTW template authoring process is obviously
> > necessary in a number of situations.  In this case, there are two
> > problems: creating the structural container, and creating the
> > components.  I think you have to offer the template developer the
> > ability to create new components by combining together other
> > components, since what constitutes a logical unit varies from problem
> > to problem.
>
> I need to play with ZPT, but perhaps if you created several
> layout templates
> with ZPT, users could pick the "best fit", then customise the
> look of it via
> Dreamweaver or GoLive?
>
> Cheers, Jon
>
>
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