[Zope-dev] Thoughts on wysiwyg 'object based' editing (once again)

[Rik Hoekstra]

Jerry.Spicklemire@IFLYATA.COM wrote:
> 
> Rik has some interesting observations regarding the depth of a present
> generation browser's "awareness" of the components that make up a Zope
> rendered html "page", which is to say nearly none. But isn't this exactly
> what XML solves for us? An XML document, even after browser rendering (not
> to be confused with the Zope server side composition stage), is still made
> up of discrete XML objects, and thus selectable, editable, etc.
> 

You are right of course, and I should have said something about this in
my mail. In fact, my thoughts were inspired in part by XMLDocument and
particularly Martijn Faassen's XMLWidgets product. Where XML is of
course the best way for data exchange and arguably should play a role in
the mechanism for editing documents, it is currently not sufficient as
XML editors have not yet been widely accepted. Therefore we need
'pluggable frontends' for all sorts of wysiwyg (HTML) editors that
currently can't handle XML.

> The beauty of this concept isn't so much that Zope / Python simply can't do
> all this by itself, we all know that Zope / Python (Grail?) can do anything
> short of levitation*. Rather the point is simply that XML is a well
> accepted, existing standard, and is bound to be supported in popular
> browsers.

Yep, but not yet. Moreover: zope documents do not currently have a XML
representation in the form I propose, though there has been rumours
about an XML version of DTML. Things have been conspicuously silent
about that point thus far.

Rik