[ZPT] RE: Is Structured Text Broken in Zope 2.4x ???

[Steve Bain]

Chris McDonough:

Thanks for your courteous reply, and the links to definitive rules for 
ClassicStructuredText and StructuredTextNG.

On zope.org, the available documentation on Structured Text for aspiring 
Zopers is a bit confusing, because it is often not clear what is definitive, 
what is is a proposal, what is ClassicStructuredText, what is 
StructuredTextNG, what is StructuredText Zwiki, and what may be just a 
member's opinion. It is also not clear as to which version of Structured 
Text is supported in which release of Zope.

To document the spacing problem in STXNG bulleted outlines, I offer a 
specific example for the benefit of other readers:

In Zope 2.4.1, the following structured text:

- Red

- Green

- Blue

	- First

	- Second

	- Third

		- Freshman

		- Junior

		- Senior

outputs to browser-rendered html that looks much like this in MS IE v5.50:

    o Red

    o Green

    o Blue
        o First

        o Second

        o Third
            o Freshman

            o Junior

            o Senior

This spacing problem is the result of an unfortunate and non-XHTML compliant 
nesting of generated tags in the html output.

Also, thank you for clarifying the issue of tables in StructuredTextNG. The 
rules are indeed very different from those that were implemented in some 
versions of ClassicStructuredText and Zwiki StructuredText.

I note that the following StructuredTextNG source does render as an HTML 
table in Zope 2.41:

|---------------------------------------|
|  Quan   |    Part #      |   Price    |
|=======================================|
|     15  | DYST-100D      |   $2195.00 |
|---------------------------------------|
|     32  | IPO-337Z       |     $95.00 |
|---------------------------------------|
|     67  | ATA-456Q       |    $395.00 |
|---------------------------------------|
|    133  | TGT-375RST     |     $20.00 |
|---------------------------------------|

However, while the resulting html is formatted well enough to render as a 
properly-sized table in MS IE, the first column of the table does not render 
correctly.

Of course, the whole issue of tables in Structured Text is probably not 
critical for the vast majority of applications. (HTML is plenty fine if one 
needs the next step up in formatting flexibility!)

I will begin work on bug reports, patches, and possibly some enhancements 
for StructuredTextNG. Any help and hints will be gratefully accepted.

Of primary interest is correcting the killer bug that appears in the 
structured-text method in Products.PythonScripts.standard in Zope 2.4.x. 
Correcting that bug appears to be the most elegant way to support 
StructuredText-formatted topics on ZPT-formatted pages.

Steve Bain


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