[Zope] ANNOUNCE: Zope/XML Roadmap

[Tony McDonald]

At 6:40 am -0400 21/7/99, Paul Everitt wrote:
>I've used Amos' work a bit, so I can describe some neat things about it.

Many thanks Paul,

>As for editing, well, it's pretty neat.  You can edit the XML Document
>as a whole, or you can go to a specific element (by, what else, adding
>/manage to it) and get a TEXTAREA to edit it.  Surprisingly, the element
>attributes (right jargon?) show up as editable Zope properties.  Let's
>say you go to an element and add a property.  When you look at the XML,
>an attribute has been added to the element.

This is starting to get *very* nice. Would I be able to add/delete a 
specific element from a folder and be able to export the resultant 
structure in an XML format?
Would the URL to get to the <author> element in this XML document

<?xml version="1.0" ?>
<library>
<book size="folio" pages="200">
<title>The art of War</title>
<author>Sun Tzu</author>
</book>
<book> .... </book>
</library>

look like
... /library/book/author ?
what would you do about multiple authors?

>What's particularly nice about this is that it doesn't version the
>entire XML text, only the Zope representation of the element.  This
>naturally means that the cache manager can swap out the elements that
>aren't being used.
>
>Amos created a "slide show" demo for me to replace my clumsy way of
>doing presentations.  I can now write the slide show material as one big
>XML document.  The body is still written as structured text and an
>attribute signals its format.  The elements acquire a document that uses
>DTML to render the contents into HTML, including previous and next
>buttons.  I can also do conditions to see if, for instance, a slide has
>been marked private.  Needless to say, I can have multiple presentations
>of the same data, or even ship the XML back in toto to IE5 or Mozilla
>with a style sheet.

I like the idea of using a document to render the contents into HTML. 
One thing that we'd want to do (eventually) is to render the contents 
of a succession of elements into RTF. Whoops, it seems like your last 
sentence answers my question about exporting into a XML document.

>I very, very much like how Amos has done this in a way that reinforces
>the good things about Zope rather than a me-too approach.  URLs march
>into the tree of an XML document.  Try that with other stuff.

This 'tree-marching', it wouldn't be XPointer based would it?, that 
would make for interesting URLs!

>Elements
>can acquire a management screen and different templates for rendering.
>Try that with other stuff.

:) another question answered!

>I'm particularly excited with the prospect
of hooking up the Catalog and indexing elements individually, as far as
I know there aren't any open source indexing systems for XML yet.
>At the same time, Cathi Davey here has taken steps to give Zope objects
>a DOM interface.  One particularly interesting use of this is to use XQL
>as a query language for Zope.

This is getting really freaky - when I first looked at getting our 
material online in a sensible fashion (ie using XML), I thought about 
using XQL as a query engine, but it was too beta and only available 
in Perl.

>In closing, there is now a bunch of stuff in Zope that provides a basis
>for people to come up with interesting ideas and extensions.  It ought
>to be exciting!

Exciting? this sounds a *lot* more than that Paul - I know what I'll 
be doing this weekend..

Whew!
tone.
------
Dr Tony McDonald,  FMCC, Networked Learning Environments Project 
http://nle.ncl.ac.uk/
The Medical School, Newcastle University Tel: +44 191 222 5888
Fingerprint: 3450 876D FA41 B926 D3DD  F8C3 F2D0 C3B9 8B38 18A2