[Zope3-dev] Axe DTML Document

[Martijn Faassen]

Florent Guillaume wrote:
[snip]
> One question you have to ask yourself is, what kind of content do you
> want ? Pure preformatted text ? Structured text ? HTML ? XML ? PDF ?
> Microsoft Word ? Where do you stop... :-)

That is an excellent point. We need Documents for each type of content,
perhaps even multiple types. There will be commonalities we can perhaps
make into a framework, but let's stop thinking about 'Document' as a
single thing.

[snip]
> What CMF Document showed us is that, while it's good to have two options
> for the kind of formatting you want (stx or html), they should be much
> more distinct code-wise, with the ability to add new components so that
> the Document can easily be extended to other types.

Switching between document types also only makes sense if this..um,
makes sense. For instance, how does one switch from plaintext content
to XML content? I can see switching structuredtext to an equivalent
XML markup, but it isn't alway a natural switch, and the question is whether
we should assume it is.

Instead we could have a collection of document types, with possible adapters
to adapt one type into another (structured text to an XML DOM view, for
instance), and also possibly a set of converters that can convert one
type to another (but if we have N documents we don't necessarily need
N**2 converters -- plenty of conversions don't make sense).

Regards,

Martijn