[Zope] Webfolders and IE5

[Ian Blenke]

> Wow, what a wonderful piece of information to know!  I'll look at adding
> this as something on Zope.org from a Member's preferences page.

That's something that I'm just now starting to pick up to speed on. Creating
a Zope Tip for something like this isn't a bad idea. 

> Another MS specific thing I've been doing a lot lately is Office2k's new
> HTML file format, kind of an MSXHTML thingie.  We needed a way to
> paginate and desktop publish the various structured text documents we
> author as part of the Unified Process we use here for consulting gigs.

We're looking for much the same thing here (as are most businesses :) I'm
working on an Engineering Intranet site for Engineering Documents with
complete version control and histories. The most difficult part is working
with structured text/graphics documents in a way that can be updated back on
the Zope server. Both Python and Zope take a bit of getting used to, even
for a seasoned vet :) 

The PDF hacks looked interesting - but this won't be adequate. Users want
Microsoft Office, they want to store documents in a common repository (with
some sort of index and search), and it wouldn't hurt if everything were on
the Intranet.

> Since (a) the new format is a clear-text compatible language, and (b)
> Zope is WebDAV compatible, we can get Zope to cobble together numerous
> documents into one long Word Document.  Even better, what you're
> actually viewing in Word is generated from different DTML methods,
> meaning we can give different contents based on things like queries, the
> role of the user, etc.

EXACTLY what I'm looking for. Collaboration on this is a must :)

> I'm modelling our sales funnel in Excel based on data pumped from an XML
> Document through various DTML methods that give me different detail.
> It's really cool!

*pant, drool* There must be others out there with this same need. A full
document publishing system based on XML with WebDAV publishing and web
presentation - it's paperless office nirvana.

People are developing Access databases and Excell spreadsheets everywhere
today for this very reason. Replace it with a simple to maintain web
interface and they're sold. Sales will want it. Engineering will want it.
Marketing will want it. Finance will want it. And IS shops *should* be
willing to supply it. :)

> Yes, I spent literally 4 hours scouring their (Microsofts) website and the
web at
> large for some kind of documentation of this damn MSXHTML-like markup
> language they use.  I want to modify the Excel spreadsheet and, using
> WebDAV, save it back to Zope, which would parse it and update things.

Been there. Done that. Burned the T-Shirt. If there were only a true
OpenSource rich-text XML editing platform with the same featureset. Someday
(soon I hope), we will have options.

> I'm a damn, damn good web scourer, and eventually concluded that
> Microsoft intentionally doesn't document it.  Believe it or not, their
> DTD declaration points to an ActiveX control.  Thus, their DTD is a
> non-published, compiled, binary, internal thing.  Unreal.

It's an XML schema. Everyone has their own schema these days. Most of them
not fully formed DTD, or published :)

- Ian C. Blenke <ian@blenke.com> <icblenke@2c2.com>