[Zope3-dev] Siesia: A new UI for Zope 3

[Stephan Richter]

On Wednesday 05 May 2004 01:44, Jim Fulton wrote:
> > The issue at hand, really, is that Zope's skinning mechanism sucks.
>
> Hm, I think we still need to work on communication. :(
> Aside from being inflamatory, this statement has no content.

Sorry, I guess I over-summarized. But I distinctly remember Paul criticizing 
this approach about a year ago. Skins +Layers use a hierarchical tree or 
inheritance, but most other UI generation system use a pipe. This makes it 
really hard for designers to use well-established patterns.

> I haven't had a chance to read much of the Siesia documentation yet.
> The little I did read though made me wonder what problem this was
> trying to solve.  It didn't help that the Skin tool starts with:
> "I admit it, i don't know much about the way Zope 3 currently handles
> skinning of an instance".

Well, he does not understand the Zope 3 mechanisms per se, but he knows how 
the CMF works. As I understand, the CMF skins+layers concept is equivalent to 
Zope 3's. But I agree the document lacks definitions and clarity; as I said I 
did not understand 70% of the document myself.

> I'm glad you suggested a Zope 3 proposal, because a Zope 3 proposal
> starts with a statement of the problem being solved.  That can be a
> combination of a statement of specific problems encountered or benefits
> that current solutions don't let is achiev.

Good point. I forgot to add this to my list. In fact in IRC I started out 
asking what the problem with the current system is and begged for an example. 

> It's pointless discussiong solutions without a much clearer statement of
> what the problem is.

As stated above, the problem is that designers cannot use established 
transformation patterns and common practices in Zope, since its rendering 
mechanisms do not support them. In the mail I tried to sketch out a solution 
for implementing the transformation pipeline, so designers could use the 
piped transformations pattern.

Regards,
Stephan
-- 
Stephan Richter
CBU Physics & Chemistry (B.S.) / Tufts Physics (Ph.D. student)
Web2k - Web Software Design, Development and Training