[Zope] - XML-style DTML code

Amos Latteier amos@aracnet.com
Fri, 29 Jan 1999 13:49:08 -0800


At 03:50 PM 1/29/99 -0500, Christopher G. Petrilli wrote:
>Someone asks why there isn't some neat GUI.
>
>Someone proposes Netscape/et al.
>
>Someone complains that using comments for DTML (<!--#var -->) makes it
>nearly impossible to use said tools.
>
>I do a tiny bit of looking, and propsose to modify the syntax to look
>more like XML, and also like PHP (which also uses the PI construct),
>never proposing that it's XML, just "XML-like"... also this will perhaps
>start to get people aclimated to typing <?ztml ?> rather than the
>existing one.
>
>Anyway, somehow that got copied to the XML list, trying to see if it was
>wellformed... it's not, nor valid, I know that, understood it from the
>start.  It wasn't my intention to make well-formed nor valid XML.
>
>well, anyway, someone proposed an option that would translate to
>well-formed XML... (I forget the name, now, damned emailer), which comes
>to something like this, which si what I'm looking at now:
>
>	<?ztml store("var name")?>
>
>Note that this is used for non-immediate insertion into the data-stream,
>and perhaps more accurately fits the use intended for PI elements. 
>That shoves it into a "register" which can be later accessed using:
>
>	&ztml;
>
>As an identity construct.  This eeems to meet all the concerns except
>that it isn't XSL... but it's not meant ot be XSL, just an
>ultra-lightweight way to get 99% of the job done.  You can then use it
>so:
>
>	<A HREF="&ztml;/FolderishTHingHere">
>
>which, according to what I read in the XML spec is totally acceptable
>:-)  Now I'd like to be able to define a bunch of these things at the
>start of a template, but that's just too complex, I'm not sure that I
>like the results of &ztml0; &ztml1; etc., which create the effective
>result of single letter variables ... evil evil evil.

Chris thanks for this excellent summary of the issues and thanks for
leading the discussion and providing patches. Go Chris!

Getting this right is an important project. I don't know enough about XML
and XML editors to know what's necessary for them to edit DTML, but it
would be great if they could. Otherwise, allowing more HTML editors to edit
DTML would be the next best thing.

Despite how sneaky and cool it is, from an esthetic point of view, I really
dislike Carsten's entity defining hack. Maybe if entities could be used
more generally in DTML, then this wouldn't seem so weird... Maybe there
could be some general way to access variables in the template's name space
using entities...

Anyway, I don't have the answers, but I want to reiterate my support for
Chris's and everyone else's efforts. Thanks!

-Amos