[Framework-Team] Re: DataGridField for z3c.form?

[Martin Aspeli]

> - z3c.form produces very awful HTML

Does that apply to the general case, or only to the case of nested 
structures like this?

The markup of the widgets I've seen has generally been pretty good. I 
think we need a much richer, mainly JavaScript-driven and probably less 
generalised widget for the "grid" use case anyway.

> - z3c.form produces very confusing user interfaces

Again, I think that applies to

> - z3c.form documentation is indeed incomplete (no mention of
>    ObjectFactory)

It's certainly better than formlibs. ;-)

> - z3c.form you can do cool stuff with it, although I am not convinced
>    it is much better than hand-coding the form

One of the reasons we had a woefully incomplete Plone control panel and 
relied on the ZMI for far too much up until Plone 3 was that no-one 
likes or bothers with hand-coding forms for things like that. The same 
goes for content add/edit menus and anything else that is largely schema 
driven. There's definitely a place for hand-coded forms, but it's not a 
panacea either.

> And the reason I cc'ed the framework team: I strongly feel that until 
> the generated markup and user interfaces from z3c.form are improved to 
> meet Plone standards Plone itself should start using it.

I think you're over-generalising. The output of a z3c.form form is not 
any worse than what we have with formlib or Archetypes (in fact, it's 
probably better, and it's certainly easier to standardise). There may be 
reasons for and against z3c.form, and the complex nested forms stuff is 
probably not quite mature, but it's not any less mature than it is in 
anything else.

Martin

-- 
Author of `Professional Plone Development`, a book for developers who
want to work with Plone. See http://martinaspeli.net/plone-book