IDEs

I don't have enough knowledge to tell you how to implement any of this, but I can tell what I'd love to see in the Zope Studio, so here goes!

There has been some discussion about assorted HTML editing tools, such as DreamWeaver, GoLive?, etc. There was also of a brief thread on the mail list about collapsible editors, such as the GFA Basic editor. It strikes me that the ability to collapse a tag would be very nifty.

The problem of keeping nested tables readable would be resolved so easily if each table could be collapsed, so you could see where things really are on the page as a whole. Using tables for page layout solves so many problems, but finding your way around can be as bad as debugging someone else's spaghetti code!

While we're on this topic, think about a WYSIWYG page view that keeps table cells the same size they would be when rendered. Maybe each cell could be toggled, to display a collapsed tag and edit control, or a rendered view. Then, the contents (HTML / DTML / XML) could be presented in a browser window for editing.

Jerry S. 2000/04/05

I didn't quite get what you described in the last paragraph. Do you think having a two panel view would be good? The left panel would show the html document tree and the right would show the rendered view. You could expand, collapse, select, and edit treenodes on the left side. The treenodes actually map onto html elements so you would see the changes on the right side as you make them. This is just an idea - I'm not saying this is even doable. -Shalabh 2000/04/08

It seems the paragraph above is less than crystaline, so I'll try to explain more clearly.

What I'm suggesting is an editor that can display an HTML Table based "page" layout as a bunch of "blank" boxes. Well, almost blank. That's where the edit control comes in.

A click on the edit button would open a new browser window with the editable contents, whether pure HTML, DTML, XML, whatever. Two panels might be OK, but the idea of opening each "box" in it's own window seems best. IDlE gives each file you open its own window, and it seems to suit my way of working.

In addition to the edit control, a collapsed tag (td) would be visible, and clicking it would display the current contents, but rendered, for a WYSIWYG view. Of course the edit button would no longer be visible while the rendered view is active. If a collapsed tag is counter-intuitive, how about something like a "render" button, if that's preferable.

I just realized how this could be done, pretty simply. As the page is composed (by ZopeStudio) the "render buttons" could be generated with links to a wrapped version of the cell content. The wrapper would be just enough HTML to keep the browser happy, so that it encounters no errors when rendering the wrapped cell content as a separate document. So, as far as Zope needs to know this is simply :

'render_html_header +
(optional: style sheet + style setting +)
cell content +
render_html_footer.' Jerry S. 2000/06/06

The size of each "box" would be determined by the size required by the rendered view. This way the "big picture" layout would stay constant, unless of course renderable content was added / deleted.

As for cases where a dataset is displayed, such as by a ZSQL query, perhaps a single "dummy" row, or cell, could stand in for design purposes.

I hope this helps. Jerry S. 2000/04/09 updated 2000/04/13

Hmm.. now I get it. Nice idea - it would be a good thing for designers since tables are used a lot for page layout. A generalization of this functionality is: 1. Parts of a document open in a separate windows for editing. 2. Partially rendered views of a document.

We need to collect all these ideas into once place and consolidate them -Shalabh 2000/04/14