[Zope] Embedded HTML tables, shared annotations

[30215.gz.uu]

Hello zopers,

I am using Zope to set up a small intranet, for
a (small) clinical lab's self-documentation.

This involves encoding as Zope objects, an already
existing printed manual (ms word) of clinical
analysis offers, to physicians. The thing is a
big list with an "inside-out" systematic, by which
I mean that maybe 25% of the entries are simplest
case and follow a completely regular pattern, while
the other entries vary from simple variants or
generalizations of that simplest pattern,
along different paths of generalization, to
complex variations and completely ad hoc entries.

With an RDBMS, I'd have had to regularize the
data completely and sacrifice some of the information.
Zope incites me to consider the challenge of
capturing more of the existing data's structure
and variations, e.g. users' (and future maintainers')
style.

Looking for the best of all words, I arrive at
the idea to define a set of "method" names,
whose results are HTML Tables, that "naturally"
embed into each other. Somehow I have a feeling
that the logic of such "distributed tabling"
can be isolated from HTML, so that a nice and
clean query language in terms of partial
functions and 2D grid portions ("tableaux") might
emerge. Since I am just starting on that hunch,
I was wondering if somebody else had already
hit on such an intuition and drawn any
conclusions from which I could shamelessly
profit.

Also, these musings reminded me of an old
project I had once started, to provide an
uniform annotation facility to annotate web
pages (using an ad hoc proxy). I abandonned
it at the time (it was four or five years
ago) because I had discovered that other
groups were much more advanced on this, and,
if I remember well, the w3c was standardizing
such a facility. Then I parted from web work,
but (while I did not look for it), I am
quite surprised that nothing like it is
currently in the hands of web users nowadays.

Of course, the commercial drive of the
growth of the web, in the meantime, explains
it. Advertisement banners overtook the
budding niche for users' annotations. But
maybe the time is now ripe for the pendulum
to swing back.

Zope strikes me as a server model that could
integrate a uniform shared annotations
facility on the pages it publishes. Thoughts,
pointers, wish to discuss, anyone ?

Regards,

Boris Borcic
--
"c++ is a contradiction in terms" - Einstein