[Zope] Re: [ZDP] Wysiwyg and the merits of a webinterface - s ome considerations

[Michel Pelletier]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Paul Everitt [mailto:paul@digicool.com]
> Sent: Friday, September 17, 1999 9:08 AM
> To: Rik Hoekstra
> Cc: zope@zope.org
> Subject: [Zope] Re: [ZDP] Wysiwyg and the merits of a webinterface -
> some considerations
> 
> 
> [I removed the ZDP from the email, as most ZDP people are on the zope
> list.]
> 
> Rik Hoekstra wrote:
> > Once in a while the subject of wysiwyg comes up on the 
> list, as it did in
> > the last few days. TO summarize the discussion as I understand it:
> > The main problem is that people want a wysiwyg front end 
> for their Zope
> 
> Perhaps there's a farther step backwards.  The following 
> people want the
> following things:

And now for a completely different perspective...

> 1) Some need to put the simplest possible tool in their casual users'
> hands, such as Netscape Composer.

I think the 'simplest possible tool' is a textarea.  Composer falls a
bit short of simple, it's quite far along in the stupid catagory
however.
 
> 2) Content managers need a very productive environment for managing
> content, including lite DTML scripting.

I agree about managing content, but what has that to do with DTML
scripting?  WebDAV and FTP can 'manage' content, when you start writing
DTML to *programatically* manage your content, you're doing something
different.
 
> 3) Developers need a productive environment for manipulating 
> the object
> model, working with relational databases, debugging problems, etc.

I agree.
 
> I posit that wysiwyg is definately the road for the first 
> audience.  The
> second audience is firmly split between those that want wysiwyg
> (Dreamweaver) and those that want to see the tags.  The third audience
> almost uniformly shuns wysiwyg.

I think the third doesn't shun it, but embraces it knowing that their
choice of tool comes at a cost.  Emacs may have a gazzilion cryptic
keybindings, and it may not be your-grandmothers-editor, but what *I*
see in emacs is definatly what I get.  It just ain't pretty.
 
> Even worse, the second and third audience only cares about 
> one tool: the
> one that they have already learned.

Yes.  I've never used and allways avoided the higher end 'design' tools,
for probably the same reason that those tools users avoid emacs.
 
> > The only issue at the moment is that the current management 
> interface (while
> > it is a pleasure to work with for developers) is not at all 
> useful for
> > non-developers.

And should be improved.  This is an area *ripe* for community involvment
and contribution, and it suprises me that no one has taken a stab at
this, considering the state of the managment interface.

> > Instead I would plea for the development of a toolkit for 
> end user web-based
> > editing environments, as I believe many of us are 
> developing them at the
> > moment. Is anyone interested? Ideas? Comments?

There is an excellent remote managment toolkit written in python
allready, ZPublisher.Client.  Merging this with a python tool would be
easy, but other tools?  Probably not possible unless they're open
sourced, and at that point it's not trivial.
 
-Michel