[Zope3-dev] pattern exploration: view chains (xslt, pdf, etc.)

[Gary Poster]

Working on 
http://dev.zope.org/Wikis/DevSite/Projects/ComponentArchitecture/ManageStaticTextContent
made me ponder about how to handle a use case like this:

I have some static xml (non-xhtml) documents in a file in Zope.  Let's say, 
hypothetically, I uploaded an Excel spreadsheet and used xls2xml to convert 
it to XML.

What if I want to see this in html?

What if I want to see this in a pdf?

What I came up with is the idea of view chains.  Imagine this, for instance:

mysite.com/sales.xml/xhtml.xslt;view/htmltopdf;view

or what if I had a zpt I wanted to convert to pdf

mysite.com/myZPT/default;view/htmltopdf;view

I can think of some ways of making this work (views would need marker 
interfaces, for one; and I have some other thoughts), but I first wanted to 
see if this seemed like a useful idea, or if folks had a better idea on how 
to accomplish this sort of thing.  Thoughts?

Gary