[Zope3-dev] Re: Applying site-wide look-and-feel (Was Re: )

[Amos Latteier]

Paul Everitt wrote:

> Stated differently:
> 
> 1) There is a theme.xhtml document (with all the JS, CSS, and images 
> that go with it).  This is owned by the web designer.  The exact same 
> artifact is used, unchanged, in Dreamweaver, the XML editor for static 
> merging, and Zope for dynamic merging.
> 
> 2) There is a merge.xhtml document.  During brainstorming, a static file 
> is used by an XML editor for rapid prototyping w/out Zope.  Later, this 
> is generated by Zope.  Two can be easily compared.
> 
> 3) There is a merge.xsl document.  This is the transform that takes (1) 
> and (2) and produces a result.  This is identical when used in 
> brainstorming and in Zope.  However, in Zope you might choose to replace 
> it with something faster than XSLT, if there is a better technique for 
> merging.
> 
> My next step is to write this as a scenario and put it in the wiki, 
> along w/ some narrated movies to show it in practice.

I don't quite understand this and would like to see the scenario.

I think that if we're going to separate these concerns:
* designing the site layout
* creating a view for a piece of content
* specifying how content is integrated into the layout

It would make sense to figure out how people doing these jobs might 
work. So I'm interested in the scenario.

My guess is that a site layout should be designed by creating an HTML 
page that has some kind of place holders where content should be 
integrated into it.

I also think that creating views can continue to use ZPT - though 
perhaps not with whole page macros. If we don't use whole page macros we 
should figure out some way that people creating views can reasonably 
preview their work in context. It's also nice if we don't break all the 
great things that ZPT provides like valid HTML and working with whole 
HTML pages rather than invalid snippets.

Finally I don't yet have any strong ideas about how content is 
integrated into a site layout. I'm not sure the XSLT is a great 
solution. Personally I dislike XSLT since it's so complex. I'd rather 
program in Python than XSLT. So I don't mind if the work is done with 
XSLT so long as I don't have to write the XSLT ;-) I'll try to think 
about this some more.

-Amos

P.S. Hi Paul.