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WildUIThoughts
Martijn--
I had a chat with Jeffrey today, revisiting the question of what the Studio should be patterened after.
To date the consensus has been Explorer-oriented IDEs. But isn't GoLive? and Dreamweaver a better target, as that is the kind of audience closer to content creators?
Have you ever used anything like GoLive? or Dreamweaver?
I'm not necessarily focused on the wywsiwyg aspect, though I'll return to that in a moment.
Rather, some quick thoughts from getting a GoLive? tour from Jeffrey:
1) Document-centric. They don't have a two-pane view. The document is the focus. Rather, they have a floating window that is the explorer.
2) Inspector. They have another floating window that inspects the currently selected thing.
3) Different selection metaphor. A single click doesn't follow an object, it selects it.
4) Attaching notes.
5) Status.
Imagine a selection metaphor in ZopeStudio like the following.
You browse the contents of your folder. The selectable items aren't underlined as hyperlinks. When you click in the area around the item, you are clicking on a DIV (or client ismap, or something similar) for that item. onclick sets the background color to grey to indicate it is selected.
Whenever something is selected, the floating window for the inspector is updated with the RDF properties for the currently selected object. Obviously double-clicking follows the item's default action.
The "different selection metaphor" makes me think in terms of having things behave differently if you are in "design mode" vs. "view mode". Which brings me to a shortcoming in Zope/DTML.
Currently it is hard to edit. Why? You get into a edit/view cycle, but quite often some '< dtml-var>' doesn't have the actual information needed for viewing it. Chances are it is the target of some other form. Zope unfortunately gives up on the entire page if one block can't be resolved.
In design mode, thought, it should skip over that and just insert something indicating a problem. Perhaps var tags could have defaults to be used while in design mode.
Jeffrey espoused an idea yesterday which really floored me. Instead of:
< dtml-var std_header> This content < dtml-var std_footer>
...he came up with (as standard_header):
<html> .... < dtml-var insertedContents> </html>
with all the site content as:
< dtml-template standard_template insertAs="insertedContents"> <h2>My Stuff</h2> < /dtml-template>
Difference number one: you don't have two things (header and footer) to manage. Difference two: the combined header and footer are valid HTML!!! Making them much easier to manage in tools like Dreamweaver.
With Michel's old "multi-format document" and the "PTK Document", Jeffrey's idea gets even easier. You don't wrap the content in a tag, you just indicate in another part of the interface the location of the rendering template.
What does this have to do with Mozilla? Well, perhaps this, combined with all the XMLWidget? et al. ideas out there, could lead to a component model for authoring content. A visual one. Using Mozilla Editor as the wysiwyg engine. Right now it seems pretty lame (it seems to have no concept of boxes). But at least it is hooked up to a good architecture.
How's that for blue sky!! In summary, do you think Dreamweaver/GoLive? provide a better idiom for a studio?
--Paul
-----------------links--------------------------------------------
golive : http://www.adobe.com/products/golive/main.html dreamweaver : http://http://www.macromedia.com/software/dreamweaver/
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One partial solution for points 1 and 2 above - Docking. Wouldn't it be wonderful to let people "dock" and "undock" windows/panels from a main window? The default would be the explorer like view but if you undock the treeview (and say, set an option that shows all objects in the tree too) and open a "view" window that's always linked to the selected object - would make it more "document-centric" ?
Hey, There could be docking option for all windows (propertyview, securityview etc)!
I've been having some MiscIdeas.
(more comming...)
~Shalabh
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