[Framework-Team] 3.0 shouldn't just be about the user facing UI

[Alec Mitchell]

On Monday 13 March 2006 09:18, whit wrote:
> just to piggy back a bit on this:
>
> I think one consideration that needs to be made is how much you guys
> want to start pursuing new style development.  By the time Plone 3
> ships, CMF 2.0 will have full customization of views(the technology is
> not far off as we stand now).
>
> My personal feeling(somewhat reinforced by what I saw at the symposium)
> is that our ui layer is on a crash course with it's self.  At best, this
> offers an opportunity to rethink how we want to work with UI as
> developers, designers, integrators, etc before stumbling into a system
> shaped by the assumptions of the old one.
>
> to summarize some of my past opinions:
> 1.  developers designing UI's for designer to do ui is bad.
> 2. designers waiting to learn new ways of doing UI until a "best
> practice" is established prevents them from weighing in on the
> aforementioned.
> 3. systems like mcdonc's z3meld and five views could go a long way to
> clearing up the plone ui mess, but only if they can gain adoption.

If we move to a meld like solution we may well end up having nobody who wants 
to work on presentation logic.  I certainly have no interest in using python 
to manipulate an XML tree in order to do the equivalent of a tal:repeat.  I 
think if we are going to move to some brave new world of designer 
friendliness it should probably to be via generation of semantic XML (with 
zpts) with XSLT transforms to provide the end-user interface; this would 
allow designers to use the available XSLT generation tools to do all sorts 
of nifty things, while allowing the developers to be removed entirely from 
presentation decisions.  This would however seem to make it somewhat more 
difficult to make rich AJAX-y client side applications with Plone, and limit 
the audience of potential plone design customizers to those with some XSLT 
expertise.  I seriously doubt this is feasible in the near future, and 
neither is moving to a meld like system.  We are stuck with making an HTML 
presentation using zpt (which has no peer for generating markup, IMHO), so 
we ought to make the most of it.

Five views, for the moment, even with the TTW customization stuff, don't seem 
to offer any help in this regard, except to the extent that they allow us to 
cordon off certain bits of purely semantic markup as mostly uncustomizable 
(which I think is quite valuable in and of itself).  Having a way of doing 
TTW view customizations is nice, but it doesn't leave us much better off 
than we are now in terms of creating a compelling story for designers.

If someone wants to write a new CMS built from the ground up using meld or 
XML/XSLT, that's great, but that's not Plone 3.0, IMO.

Alec