[Zope-dev] RE: XHTML Templates comments from the peanut gallery

[Jay, Dylan]

>  However, the focus of the new Template architecture will be a new
>  format based on XHTML.  This XHTML Template will be focused on
>  giving Site Designers round trip presentation authoring using the
>  dominant tools such as Dreamweaver.
>
>  XHTML Templates will be complete, well-formed HTML that look like a
>  resource will look when the XHTML Template is applied to it.  There
>  will be no "source vs. rendered" issue.
>
>  In this Presentation Architecture, Site Designers can start mocking
>  up a Zope site by editing real HTML and graphics in Zope from the
>  very beginning.  There will be nothing Zope-ish in what they are
>  doing.
>
>  As the mockups turn into live content, certain regions of the XHTML
>  Template will be "connected" to the live content.  This is done by
>  indicating the object data that will be inserted when the XHTML
>  Template is applied to content.

This all seems like a good idea but its hard its not very concrete. I
proposed something very similar about a year ago.

http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope-dev/1999-September/001624.html

It was an extension to DTML that enabled the use of documents that were
rendered html and dtml source combined. This gives you round trip wysiwyg
editing without "doing away" with the whole DTML scripting thing. A designer
might make a mockup, the coder would then zopify it by putting in iterations
etc in DTML as they normally would. The designer could then view the
document in "design-mode" that would render the DTML but keep special tags
in place around the rendered content that contained the code. Whent the
designer saved back this version there would be a spcial "design-mode"
compiler that would work out all the DTML objects etc the relevent bits of
content (and code) belonged to. Content relating to any object that the
designer doesn't have permission to edit or the content was dynamic like
from a database, just gets discarded.

This solution seems to achieve most of your aims for XHTML but without some
of the weird architecture changes.

Dylan Jay
Avaya Communication.