> I agree on the separation of concerns, adding content to the page > should be a different task than changing its "look and feel".
I don't necessarily *disagree* with this, but let me ask: is it possible to shoot some communities/collections/items through a specific Aspect and others not? Because if not, there's an assumption hidden in the Manakin architecture that I don't think is going to hold water: that all parts of a DSpace repository are going to want the same behaviors over (or even information about) their contents. I'm not a visual designer (I'm actually completely awful at it; I can implement other people's visual designs, but the ones I create myself are garbage). I'm more of an interaction designer, which tends to suspend me rather uncomfortably over the "adding content" versus "look and feel" divide. To me, "look and feel" is not a frill, and it's not intrinsically separable from the behavior of the application. By way of example... I could write an Aspect that put enough information in the DRI to turn DSpace into a halfway-decent image-collection display application, with nice thumbnail-based navigation and all. (Well, I probably couldn't, actually, but I see how it's possible.) If I turn that Aspect loose on my entire repository, however, I am choking DRIs with a lot of unnecessary information in collections that don't contain images. Ditto for writing an Aspect designed to navigate through page views for an item containing a mess of ordered TIFF images. (I don't think that's possible in a Theme!) I suspect this mindset of mine has led to communications problems on my part in the past, and is liable to lead to more... but in all honesty, I'm worried that Manakin may have too narrow a sense of "look and feel" to be optimally useful for diverse DSpace repositories. Dorothea -- Dorothea Salo [EMAIL PROTECTED] Digital Repository Librarian AIM: mindsatuw University of Wisconsin Rm 218, Memorial Library (608) 262-5493 ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by: Microsoft Defy all challenges. Microsoft(R) Visual Studio 2008. http://clk.atdmt.com/MRT/go/vse0120000070mrt/direct/01/ _______________________________________________ DSpace-tech mailing list DSpace-tech@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/dspace-tech
