[Zope] ANNOUNCE: Zope/XML Roadmap

[Paul Everitt]

I've used Amos' work a bit, so I can describe some neat things about it.

As for editing, well, it's pretty neat.  You can edit the XML Document
as a whole, or you can go to a specific element (by, what else, adding
/manage to it) and get a TEXTAREA to edit it.  Surprisingly, the element
attributes (right jargon?) show up as editable Zope properties.  Let's
say you go to an element and add a property.  When you look at the XML,
an attribute has been added to the element.

What's particularly nice about this is that it doesn't version the
entire XML text, only the Zope representation of the element.  This
naturally means that the cache manager can swap out the elements that
aren't being used.

Amos created a "slide show" demo for me to replace my clumsy way of
doing presentations.  I can now write the slide show material as one big
XML document.  The body is still written as structured text and an
attribute signals its format.  The elements acquire a document that uses
DTML to render the contents into HTML, including previous and next
buttons.  I can also do conditions to see if, for instance, a slide has
been marked private.  Needless to say, I can have multiple presentations
of the same data, or even ship the XML back in toto to IE5 or Mozilla
with a style sheet.

I very, very much like how Amos has done this in a way that reinforces
the good things about Zope rather than a me-too approach.  URLs march
into the tree of an XML document.  Try that with other stuff.  Elements
can acquire a management screen and different templates for rendering.
Try that with other stuff.  I'm particularly excited with the prospect
of hooking up the Catalog and indexing elements individually, as far as
I know there aren't any open source indexing systems for XML yet.

At the same time, Cathi Davey here has taken steps to give Zope objects
a DOM interface.  One particularly interesting use of this is to use XQL
as a query language for Zope.

In closing, there is now a bunch of stuff in Zope that provides a basis
for people to come up with interesting ideas and extensions.  It ought
to be exciting!

[P.S. could someone on the XML-SIG list post a reference to Amos'
message?]

--Paul

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Tony McDonald [mailto:tony.mcdonald@ncl.ac.uk]
> Sent: Wednesday, July 21, 1999 4:46 AM
> To: Zope List
> Subject: Re: [Zope] ANNOUNCE: Zope/XML Roadmap
> 
> 
> This is really good news.
> At the moment, I go through a *lot* of hoops to get my study guides 
> into an XML format (from RTF) and then into SQL so that they can be 
> delivered through a Zope frontend in good old HTML. An example of 
> what we do is at http://nle.ncl.ac.uk/nle/demo/ (select the 'database 
> driven study-guides' link)
> 
> One thing that we want to be able to do is edit the material online - 
> however, to do that means that we need to recreate the XML element, 
> together with it's attributes from the SQL entry, and then put it in 
> the right place in the XML document hierarchy. Then go through the 
> conversion process again.  If I can put my XML documents more or less 
> 'as-is' into a Zope system, I am going to be one *very* happy camper!
> 
> Tone.
> ------
> Dr Tony McDonald,  FMCC, Networked Learning Environments Project 
> http://nle.ncl.ac.uk/
> The Medical School, Newcastle University Tel: +44 191 222 5888
> Fingerprint: 3450 876D FA41 B926 D3DD  F8C3 F2D0 C3B9 8B38 18A2
> 
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