[Zope] RFC: Flaws in Structured text

[Pavlos Christoforou]

On Mon, 13 Mar 2000, Olivier Deckmyn wrote:

> Oups...
> 
> I would like to correct my RFC with :
> 
> <table>
>   <tr>
>      <th>FirstName</th><th>LastName</th><th>Age</th>
>   </tr>

This will imply some parameter to define whether you want headers or not
as not everybody uses them. Unless we can come up with some clever (but
visually pleasing in ASCII) format. 

Alexander also mentioned he does not like the <p> elements inside <li>
elements but IMO are required in cases where there are more than one
paragraphs in an <li> element. Unless we default single paragraphs in <li>
elements to non <p>, but then we break consistency.

I suppose a complete rewrite of stx is in order using a more modular
interface. For example I was thinking of one class per structure element
with the appropriate input method to receive the stx text, and a number of
output methods to produce a variety of formats, html,pdf,rtf etc. This is
the approach I followed in the Table patch but it is also slower. The
original stx was designed with performance in mind.

One suggestion I have (and it would be relatively easy to implement) is to
cache the rendered document in a volatile attribute attached to the
DTMLmethod/Document that contains it, together with a simple checksum of
the input text. Then we would be free from the performance constrain at
least to some extent.

Pavlos