faassen at vet
Oct 26, 2001, 3:22 PM
Post #3 of 5
(1477 views)
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Charles Y. Choi wrote:
> First off, many thanks to Martijn for taking on Parsed XML - this product
> even with its flaws has been too useful not to use and deserves a lot of
> love.
Thanks! At least if you mean me and not the Other Martijn. :)
[snip]
> We've used Parsed XML largely as a container for content, which we map to
> HTML using DTML, Python DOM, and most recently ZPT calls.
Is the mapping to HTML through DTML fast enough currently? (should get
faster in the future though with my patch)
> Visually editing the DOM tree via the Zope Management Interface has not
> really been useful to us. Honestly, IMHO there are better tools for editing
> XML (Emacs, XML Spy, ArborText, etc.) than ZMI, especially through a DOM
> tree.
I like the ability to type in a bit of XML through the web. The tree
view itself isn't that useful to me either, though I imagine it would
be useful in case of large documents, where I want to edit only a small
section.
> On the other hand, making the DOM tree a HTML form with text boxes populated
> with the node values could be very useful.
I'm having trouble envisioning what such a form should look like, could
you give more details?
> Fixing bugs with Parsed XML is high on my wish list:
>
> * Copy and Paste of Parsed XML objects is buggy (though Karl mentioned that
> a fix was made but not released a while back).
I hadn't heard of this one before -- see how much I've used them! :)
Let's hope the fix is in the CVS. If not, we can always email Karl and
ask.
> * Editing of Parsed XML objects though FTP doesn't work.
I'd be very happy to see patches for this. :)
> * Instantiation of a Parsed XML object by importing a file requires that
> you explicitly type an id for it, rather than using the existing file
> name for the id.
This seems to be the case in other Zope objects as well. Anyway, patches
are welcome if this is actually possible (there must be a reason why
some of these other objects don't do this).
> * Performance can always improve.
The next release should have increased performance for access through
Zope, though the raw Python performance of the underlying DOM won't
change.
> Questions on where Parsed XML is going, esp. with Zope pushing Zope Page
> Templates (ZPT):
>
> Will Parsed XML have XSLT support?
I hope so; I'm not the one developing it but Dethe is looking into it,
as you saw in his reply.
> Will it really matter if integration with ZPT is good enough?
I think XSLT support is important. I haven't used XSLT myself yet, but
I imagine usages which are harder to do with ZPT. With XSLT you could
potentially report on *any* underlying data that is exposed to a DOM,
such as the mythical ZDOM we're looking into. If the ZDOM exposes a
comprehensible DOM view on underlying Zope objects, it could be possible
that using XSLT becomes one of the easiest ways to generate HTML for
complicated object structures.
> So far in working with Parsed XML and
> ZPT, we've gotten this far:
>
> ZPT making DOM calls to Parsed XML Object: Good
> ZPT calling Python script with DOM calls to Parsed XML Object: Good
>
> What is not clear is how to create a ZPT-style method (arguably not
> possible,
> since ZPTs are objects) to directly render a Parsed XML object, like a
> DTML-method:
>
> object/viewXML
> ^ ^
> | |
> parsed xml dtml method
>
> Anyone out there with some insights into this?
Hm, I haven't tried this yet, but I don't quite understand what the
difficulties would be. ZPT objects are acquired, right?
Regards,
Martijn
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