Thorsten Scherler wrote:
On Sat, 2005-07-16 at 00:54 -0700, Diwaker Gupta wrote:
...
Then, I think we should build up a publicly available repository of the
following:
o contracts
o views
o skins
contracts: As a very crude analogy, think of these as "components" in a portal
or "thinggies" that you add to your "My Yahoo!" page for instance. People can
submit and pull in contracts from the repository to mix and match as they
please
Yes, that is as well my vision.
If this is your vision then I ask again that we consider the Cocoon
Portal Engine as a way of implementing forrest:views. It is pretty
mature (currently in its second version) and is way ahead of views in
terms of implementation.
At the moment I'm really not sure what forrest:views gives us that
Cocoon Portals do not give us. The portal engine is simply a way of
describing a layout of a page and an engine for building that page.
Content for the protlets can come from any other source (including Forrest).
I really am having a hard time understanding the difference between
forrest:contracts and a Coplet (a portlet in the Cocoon Portal).
NOTE: I have not looked at the Cocoon portal engine since version 1
around three years ago. I'm willing to help evaluate the portal engine
for the forrest:views implementation, but it only makes sense if we are
working together as a community to consider it as an implementation.
These views will be able to take a configuration saying what format we
want the output in (XHTML, FO, PDF, Text, POD, VoiceXML etc.) and will
select the correct type of templates accordingly:
I'm sure this is a good point looking forward, but frankly speaking, I don't
know how much sense it makes to write views for other formats. For example,
what is a use case for using views in the text format? Things like menus and
tabs and credits and compliance links and fontsizing etc don't make a lot of
sense with text. People may argue that they are applicable to PDF, but I
can't envision myself writing custom views for PDFs.
You would write them for fo and not for PDF. ;-)
You ask for the usecase for views in text format? Maybe that is not the
best example but consider a cellular phone and a normal browser. The
phone will need a different view because it has to render the
information in a different format. Another usecase is the brand new
voice output.
Text (or any other output format is applicable). If I want to embed a
copyright notice and a disclaimer (for example) in every document in a
site then I want it in all formats, not just XHTML.
I think it is important for us to remember that some devs were not
present when we defined the terms in views and we still haven't posted
that discussion onlist (I have an almost complete summary in my drafts
box, I'll post it soon). For now it is sufficient to say we now talk of
forrest:views (the structure of the output page) and themes (the look
and feel of a page).
However, even when we consider themes they are still useful in text
output, for example, do you want top level sections to appear like this:
===========
Section One
===========
or this:
===============
= Section One =
===============
Ross
