[Zope] Midgard

[Alexander Staubo]

Christopher Petrilli wrote:
>A'hoy! I knew Michel was up to something, my ears hurt...
>Seriously though,
>I think that there are some elegant ways to solve this.  If
>only there were
>"cascading menus" in HTML ;-)
[snip]

But there are -- check out the optgroup tag
(http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/interact/forms.html#h-17.6). This tag
has, afaik, been since at least the HTML 3 draft, although it is not
rendered ideally by browsers such as IE. (IE renders everything as a
flat list -- too bad.) For example:

<select name="ObjectToInsert">
  <optgroup label="Zope">
     <option label="Folder" value="...">Folder</option>
     <option label="File" value="...">File</option>
  </optgroup>
</select>

To enforce strict structures in the object list, I suggest using dot
paths: eg., "Zope.Builtin.Folder", "Vendor.DigitalCreations.SQLMethod",
etc. This permits sorting, and makes it possible to organize items into
a hierarchical tree structure. Maybe the Products folder could be
organized this way, too, rather than the flat structure we have today:
Products/Zope/Builtin/, Vendor/DigitalCreations/, etc. -- Zope could
glean the dot path from the physical installation path, simple as that.

This scheme obviates duplicate identifiers, too: If I write a product
called MyProduct, its identifier will be made unambiguious by the fact
that it's installed into Products/AlexanderStaubo/MyProduct -- avoiding
possible conflict with another MyProduct.

Alexander Staubo
http://www.mop.no/~alex/
mailto:redhand@mop.no