[Zope] Zope to plain html

Paul Everitt Paul@digicool.com
Sat, 10 Apr 1999 11:13:06 -0400


Karl wrote:
> Hmm, but isn't the big problem with all of this that zope 
> doesn't use your
> standard .html, .gif, etc. extensions for it's URL's.

Sure, Zope can use these.  Just name your objects index.html, logo.gif,
etc.
 
> This is something kind of bothers me a bit. Suppose I have a 
> site and I
> want to move it to Zope to make it easier to manage. But I 
> have a lot of
> people who visit my site and may have bookmarked various 
> pages. I don't
> want my URL's to break because that means lost eyeballs, and 
> depending on
> what I'm doing, lost business. Now I understand I can make 
> zope respond to
> things like /index.html or /News/hello.gif, but doesn't this 
> require some
> tricks. I mean, names like file.html isn't "the zope way", is 
> it? So to
> use things like "wget" or curl or something like that, I need 
> to do some
> pretty careful planning before I get started.

Hmm, that's a good point.  I personally like thinking about a "logo"
without embedding in its ID that it is a JPG.  What happens if I decide
to switch to a GIF or PNG?  Why should I have to embed in the object ID
the information about how to view it?  The "web object model" transmits
type information as metadata, not in the name of the object!

Reason number 57 why objects are better than files, I suppose.  But
you're right -- people that want to export to a filesystem had better go
lowest common denominator and be prepared for the silliness of
filesystems.
 
> Am I right, or is my zope newbie status simply out of control 
> here <g>.

Nope, your right, except that there isn't anything in Zope that prevents
putting "file extensions" in object IDs.  Notice the distributions you
downloaded when you installed Zope?  Those ended in .tgz, .exe, etc.
And they are Zope objects stored in the Zope database...

--Paul