[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> Enhydra's XMLC is designed to be editable in WYSIWYG composition tools. Or so
> it is claimed.
For the collective knowledge, after reading xmlc.enhydra.org a little:
XMLC semantically seems to be similar to some of the simple templates
systems that were passed around -- basically, you can just mark blocks
in XMLC. This is done with the id attribute... i.e., to mark a block
you use:
<span id="blockname">some text, maybe which will be replaced</span>
Otherwise XMLC is entirely code-driven. It basically parses the
HTML/XML document, and presents the Java programmer with a the
standard DOM for the document, which they can manipulate to create the
dynamic page. ID tags make it easier to find particular elements, and
thus give a way to mark text. But marking things is *all* you can do
when editing HTML.
I imagine there's useful functions to manipulate the document in
typical ways. But the basic concept is very minimal, far more than
ZPT, and more minimal than nearly all the systems presented here.
However, ID tags are probably better supported than ZPT's extended
attributes.
> >Also, people shouldn't just be able to use WYSIWYG tools, but people
> >who use these should be able to interact well with people who don't.
> >So, while you *can* use explicit terminators instead of newlines, once
> >someone uses newlines the template becomes inaccessible to WYSIWYG
> >users.
>
> Things are more likely to work in future if the template syntax remains within
> the confines of XML elements and entities. As I noted before, many editors are
> not up to the task of dealing with this yet, and probably none are up to
> dealing with this in a way that I would like, but XML is certainly the most
> natural way of specifying template elements in an XML document.
I think extended tags have shown themselves to be very difficult to
use. DTML-style tags produce wildly improper HTML, not to mention XML
(e.g., <img src="<dtml-var imagename>">). They also are unfriendly to
nearly all HTML-based tools, which is ironic in a way. XSL-style
declarations seem like they make something simple into something very
very hard. So I'm not sure what an XML form of template declaration
should be. ZPT feels like the best example of an XML-based template
language I've seen so far.
Also, these all make it hard to generate non-XML/HTML forms of text,
which includes CSS -- which is very important to XML -- and
JavaScript. Using XML with quoted text (e.g., <img src="<var
name="imagename">">) is possible, but also horribly ugly.
If you have other examples of XML syntaxes, please tell -- I always
like novelty.
Ian
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