I've been able to get assets loading if I place them with the pages (read: java page files) and load them via Java syntax. I understand in some cases there can be java page files without templates so that behavior is correct as far as it goes. However for any page with significant GUI building it's usually done by a non-programmer and always originally built with images and assets placed in relation to the html files.
Of course, for the sake of including programming, then we take an html file and alter it to be an xhtml "template" and make minor alterations so the images and assets get loaded via the java page, then simply referenced in the template rather than actually loaded there. I know there is NO perfect answer for all phases of projects, but for a large project with complex graphical pages (and heaven help if often modified graphical pages) that could get to be a bit onerous. Are there plans to somewhat improve this any? Right off, the java page file already knows where to find the template - can it also look relative to the template for the images? We would still have to modify the original html to alter the original loading statements, but it seems (a) easier to leave the images where they were relative to the html (template) files and (b) more proper to get image files out away from java classes, keeping the java code more "off to itself" rather than encumbered with a bunch of image files intermingled. Of course, long-term, a much more difficult but wonderfully magical step might be for Tapestry to read the template's original image loading syntax and re-translate those if necessary to create the asset loading code in the java page class to properly send assets across. That would be great then since as long as we ensure the document sticking to strict xml structure, it could then be accurately viewed / modified in the GUI builder, but still viable to a Tapestry application. (note that DW now includes a strict xhtml setting). But I'm guessing that all of this is probably a phase-two / nice-to-have type thing. But keep it in mind. With that design assets can be loaded via java or can be inferred from the original GUI author's html-loading syntax. But again, we could live with altering original page designs until the core is solid enough to begin heading out into these sorts of things - yet a nice first step would be to just add template relative searching for the assets themselves. Any thoughts? Am I missing a design overview that would explain this some other way that I'm not catching?