[ZPT] (no subject)

[Evan Simpson]

Casey Duncan wrote:
> I think we need to explore a bit more why expansion
> was turned on by default in the first place. Evan?

In the beginning, there was the idea of sharing presentation elements. 
We also wanted the virtues of editing-in-context.  For a while, we tried 
to design a system in which you could edit a page that contained shared 
elements and have your edits to the elements applied to their source. 
There were too many questions about how this should work (what if you 
don't have permission to edit the shared source?  What if you didn't 
mean to edit the shared element?), so we went with the much simpler idea 
that you can see the elements when editing your page, but only edit them 
by editing the page that defines them.

We hoped that we could work with editing tools such as Dreamweaver to 
highlight shared elements, and perhaps make them read-only.  Our focus 
was very much on WYSIWYG tools, and we considered page designers to be 
the primary audience, so we didn't consider how annoying macro expansion 
is when you're editing the source as text.

Since their release, we've gotten a lot of feedback on ZPTs from 
programmers, and very little from designers or programmer/designer 
teams.  It's pretty clear now that there needs to be finer control over 
macro expansion, and not just on a site-wide or page-by-page basis, 
either.  Unless we're going to give up on the idea of macro expansion 
altogether (which I don't want to do), there needs to be a facility for 
turning it on or off on a per-user, per-access-method basis, as well as 
setting defaults, as in:

   By default, expand only on WebDAV access, not FTP or ZMI.
   For user evan, don't expand on any access.
   For user penney, expand all but ZMI access.

This isn't trivial, unfortunately.

Cheers,

Evan @ Zope