[Zope] Zope XML processing

Gabe Wachob gwachob@findlaw.com
Tue, 02 Feb 1999 14:26:13 -0800


I also thought of this:

It would be nice to be able to have XML document refer to each other (via
external entity references) as though they existed in a filesystem with the
same directory structure as the Zope environment. That is, if doc1.xml is
/xml/examples/dox1.xml

and doc1.xml has <!ENTTTY other SYSTEM "../include/other.xml"> and uses
&other;, then it would be kewl to have the file other.xml exist in
/xml/include/other.xml

The reason I say this would be cool is that you could develop an entire "web
site" in XML and rely upon XSL (if you so chose) to convert it to HTML for
presentation. And of course, the XML source can be an SQL query, or the
product of some external program. I'm not sure if this is cool for kewlness's
sake, or whether it makes a lot of sense to do.. I'm sure someone can think of
a real good use for this.

How hard would to do this? Donno. Don't know if its even possible unless you
hack the xml-0.5 code.

    -Gabe

P.S. You could do cool things if you made non-trivial XMLSource objects -- ie
you could theoretically build an entire app on a complicated XMLSource that
took URLs as a parameter, parsed that query, sent a request to some other
server which spoke XML, got a result back, and composed that result content
into XML for you, which could then be presented as HTML (if neccesary). More
likely is the static site that is generated by a set of parameters given to
the XMLSource which essentially "builds the site" for you.  Other ideas?