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

[Janko Hauser]

Amos Latteier wrote:

> 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 want to note that the problem is exactly this assumption. Most pages
of more complicated sites consist of compound information. There is not
one document to render into a content slot, but a lot of different
pieces. And the problem is exactly how to struture the layout of these
different content parts. Portal-pages are the common example for this.

Doing this with templates, especially hole-page templates leads to a
template explosion, because for each small difference in layout one
needs a new template or a template with much logic on the other hand.

The problem to solve is how to get a flexible system to define slots
and then define which content goes into these slots. If one has the
concept for such slots, they will also probably be used to define the
other parts of a page, like navigation, header, right column and so on.

These more functional elements are normally done with more to very
complex template macros, which are not really approachable to designers.

In the current discussion I feel always that the problem is approached
from two different ends. On the one side the designer, which does want a
complete page to design. But what we want on the other side is to not
depend to much on designers, as we want to have flexible layouts, so
that not every different page needs to be designed again.

I have currently no solution, although we are working on a system to
assemble pages, although from the view point of an application, where
the application has and needs much control over the content, not for a
general framework, which does need to make as few as possible
assumptions about the using applications.


> 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.
>
If we speak about XSLT, we can perhaps distill what it is used for.
Namely to work somehow on some form of rendered content, which is not
possible with templates, as their result is not manageable besides put
together, to get some xhtml out of it. Such transformations of some
DOM-like trees can be done with a lot of tools. Question is, if it is
really needed?

With regards and high interest in the discussion.

__Janko