[Zope] Zope DHTML and XHTML : Moving things to the Client-sid e

Alexander Staubo alex@mop.no
Sat, 4 Mar 2000 18:17:59 +0100


> From: Hannu Krosing [mailto:hannu@tm.ee]
> Sent: Friday, March 03, 2000 11:12 AM
> To: Sin Hang Kin
> Cc: Zope Admin list
> Subject: Re: [Zope] Zope DHTML and XHTML : Moving things to the
> Client-side
>
[snip]
> > 3. Make the current Zope tag comply with xml standards : 
> they should end
> > with /> or accept an end tag.
> 
> Why ? As has been revealed in several discussions before, it 
> would be very 
> limiting for DTML to force compliance to XML (dtml tags 
> inside html tags, etc)

I have not followed the discussions you're referring to, so this may be
old news to you, but one simple way to provide XML compliance without
screwing up the HTML is to require that the HTML -- or whatever you're
rendering -- must be properly UTF-8 encoded. This is probably the least
painful way of attaining XML compliance. 

Unfortunately, it *will* be painful unless you're also using an
XML-compliant editor. The low-level DTML source will end up looking a
bit like this:

  <html>
  &lt;head&gt;&lt;title&gt;<var name="title_or_id"/>&lt;/title&gt;
  &lt;/head&gt;
  [...]
  &lt;/html&gt;

The editor takes care of the en-/decoding of character entities.

An obvious alternative is to use XHTML and XML namespaces, which would
currently -- because clients aren't usually XHTML-aware -- incur
additional XHTML-to-HTML processing on the server side.

-- 
Alexander Staubo         http://alex.mop.no/
"What the hell, he thought, you're only young once, and threw himself
out of the window. That would at least keep the element of surprise
on his side." --Douglas Adams, _The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy_