[Zope] File extension mangling & FTP/WebDAV

[Joel Burton]

As many of us know, it's tricky to edit DTML/ZPT files in GoLive and
Dreamweaver because both of them expect valid HTML files to have an
extension (to be fair, both allow you to configure these extensions, so we
could use something like '.dtml'; we just can't have it be blank.)

I think that naming DTML Docs & Methods with extensions is a Bad Thing --
then, links are dependent upon the format of the file. If you switch from
a dtml method to a dtml document or to a PageTemplate, you'd have to
change your links. (Plus, .extensions make for slightly uglier DTML
code; see my message earlier this week about graphic files w/.gif or .jpg
extensions.)

One possible workaround would be to patch the FTP and WebDAV
upload/download so that:

 * for all the files in a folders, the server would add a simulated
extension. For example, for dtml methods, the server would report a file
called 'index_html.dtmm', or for dtml documents, 'index_html.dtmd'.

 * this file could easily be updated by most HTML tools.

 * when saving this file, the Zope server would re-mangle the filename
back to the original.


It's definitely a hack, but could be coded in much less time than it will
take Macromedia & Adobe to fix their programs.

I'd be willing to take a first cut at this, but I'm hoping someone has
already done this, or has begun this work.


-- 
Joel Burton   <jburton@scw.org>
Director of Information Systems, Support Center of Washington