[Zope] (Fwd) Zope musings

David Ascher da@ski.org
Mon, 22 Feb 1999 09:57:35 -0800 (Pacific Standard Time)


On Mon, 22 Feb 1999, Mike Pelletier wrote:

> On Wed, 17 Feb 1999, David Ascher wrote:
> 
> >   - a clean, robust, and simple interaction between the user (someone who
> >     does not want to learn HTML but wants to manage their web page
> >     nonetheless) and the "web server" -- Zope in this case.
> 
>     Do you think it's reasonable to expect to "manage" a web page with no
> understanding of, or willingness to learn, the underlying technology?  It
> wasn't so very long ago that you couldn't consume web content without some
> understanding of what was going on, let alone produce it.  Have things really
> changed enough to allow start-to-finish creation without understanding?  It
> really has never happened with any other media.

The biggest selling point for Zope in my organization has been the ability
to delegate content management to the content providers (our webmaster is
completely overloaded).  To the content providers, the content is just
"documents", which they edit in Microsoft Word or the like.  Teaching the
underlying technology to said content providers is a prodigious waste of
time for the organization, which does not see web serving as one of its
primary goals.  Web serving is simply something that we'll do if it is
*easy* and *cheap*.

On the topic of not understanding the underlying technology, I think it's
safe to say that most content providers don't understand file formats,
disk formats, postscript or any of that underlying technology.  They
understand "Headings", "Titles", "Bold", "Save", "Load", "Undo".

All I was arguing for is a pretty face on the editing and publishing
process.  Which Netscape Composer apparently will do mostly, and WebDAV
probably much better soon.

--david