[Zope] Zope to plain html

[Karl Fast]

> > 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!

Ahh, now that's a good way of putting it. Yes, sending stuff as metadata
is helpful, as long as you've got the tools to interpret that. I'd never
really thought if it that way, but now that you describe it as such, I
understand the zope philosophy a little better. Maybe a good point for the
ZDP FAQ.

> 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.

I can think of a few cases where this would be useful. We've already
mentioned the main one, where you want to use Zope to manage all your
content but for some reason you can't or won't publish it all in Zope and
need a static dump (maybe your boss only let you choose Zope if you made
sure there's a parachute of sorts).

A likely scenario is publishing files you expect people to download to
their hard drive. Like a gallery of wallpaper images, software updates, or
PDF files. 

I guess the moral of the story is to sit down and think things through
because their may be some places where file extensions are useful if not
critical.

_______________________________________________________________
karl fast                                       fast@lights.com