[Zope3-dev] DISCUSS: Consolidation of Zope 3 UI wiki pages

[Paul Everitt]

On jeudi, nov 14, 2002, at 03:10 Europe/Paris, Joachim Werner wrote:
>
> I have argumented a lot in favour of more DHTML etc., but don't get me
> wrong: This is not about the "fancyness" of the UI. This is about
> efficiency. If ASP.net provides developers with a UI to drag&drop-build
> validating web forms, Zope has to have something similar. Which does 
> not
> necessarily mean that we also need a drag&drop thingie, but we need a 
> tool
> (or an approach) that is similarly efficient.

I can sympathize with this position, but please understand that 
statement like "Zope has to have something similar" don't really mean 
much.  Zope will have what people are willing to provide.  If someone 
is willing to study what MS did, then provide something like that in 
Zope, then it might become part of Zope.

I know I'm repeating the obvious, but it's for a good reason.  I don't 
want the perfect vision to be the enemy of the first step of progress.  
It will take a *massive* amount of thinking, communicating, and 
assimilating the deluge of feedback to tackle a Big User Interface 
project.

I am interested in what can be done in one week in Rotterdam.  I don't 
want to go to Rotterdam if we are going to reparse the universe.  In 
order to make some progress, we need to remove 987 of the ideas on the 
table and focus on the 13 ideas we can do in one week.

Understand that the outcome is not permanent.  It's just one step, and 
the other 987 ideas can then be evaluated in terms of what we learned.  
This is something that is hard for me, as I've been as guilty as anyone.

I'm reminded of the quote: "In order to build a shelf you first have to 
invent the universe."  Or something like that.  I'm personally not up 
for inventing the universe between now and Rotterdam.  After Rotterdam, 
I'm eager to discuss everthing else.

>>     We can always add in fancy DHTML stuff later (we want to), but 
>> now we
> need
>>     concrete action. So we'll focus on plain old HTML + CSS keeping
>>     javascript supplementing in mind. People who want to discuss 
>> mozilla
> XUL
>>     anyway can go sit in another room. :)
>
> I am not in favour of XUL either. It seems that plain DOM-based 
> interfaces
> that work in both IE and Mozilla are possible, at least with the next
> generation of Mozilla, while XUL is always a Mozilla-only story. This 
> can be
> a very nice plug-in option like a wxPython-based fat client (or call 
> it an
> IDE). But definitely not the main focus for the core UI efforts ... 
> (except
> for keeping the API straight for plug-ins).

Let's please stop talking about Mozilla.  What Stephan, me, and others 
worked on was our own thing.  We never advocated making it part of the 
core, and we fully expected that people could (and would) safely ignore 
it.  It was, pure and simple, scratching our own itch.  It's possible 
I'll revisit it soon, but not as something under the flag of Zope 3.

--Paul