[Zope-dev] wygiwys

[Jeffrey Shell]

> A simpler possibilities would be to provide an Java editing 
> applet with
> syntax highlighting, right click form support and syntax completion 
> that hooked inside Zope management console. So instead of the good
> old form, let's have a sophisticated html editor embedded in it.
> 
> ah..dream on 

Ahh, Java.  Evolving Point'n'Click to
Point'n'Click'n'Wait'n'Groan'n'Scream (and wonder why it behaves
differently than you expect?)  :)

If the community were to come up with something REALLY good, we'd be
interested.  But there's a lot of difficulty matching the advanced
philosphies of Zope (Acquisition, Security, and now ZClass based
objects) and DTML (namespaces, syntax, general concepts) with just about
any visual editor out there.  A _LOT_ of difficulty.  It would be a
project of some serious effort, and we haven't seen anybody with enough
initiative to come up with a plan of tackling this.

On the other hand, the new syntax is easier to work into smart
(non-visual) editors like Alpha (and Emacs-ish editor on the Mac) with
syntax completion and all that.  Some tags like the contributed dtml-let
tag may have some difficulties in these environments that prefer to help
keep code very neat by quoting all attributes (a good thing really),
since the dtml-let tag behaves differently (ie,

 <dtml-let bob=uncle lu="aunt()" billy="'cousin'">

)

And there's always problems with this perrenial favorite (dtml tags
inside of HTML tags) -- 

<tr <dtml-if sequence-index-even>bgcolor="#c0c0c0"</dtml-if>>

And, well, a trying-to-be-SGML-complient editor that is doing all these
wonderful things to help you (syntax hiliting, completion, dialog boxes
with tag attributes) panics and jumps over these.

But situations like that aside, the new syntax is significantly easier
to work with.  And with FTP and WebDAV integration, authoring outside of
the management interface is made a little bit easier (but work still
needs to be done in this area to help it along).

So, the dream lives on... :)