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

[Tonico Strasser]

Amos Latteier wrote:
> 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.

I think it is enougth to get the work preview directly from the server 
(different skin or development server). I don't understand why someone 
would like to preview a piece of template code from the local 
filesystem? Or did you mean something different? More important for me, 
is the ability to validate my HTML.

> 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.

It's difficult to create allways valid ZPTs, but it's easy to make them 
well-formed.

> 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.

Me too, I learnded a bit of XSLT and was looking for a good XML server, 
but then I found Zope and ZPTs :)

Tonico