Forum OpenACS Q&A: Response to Utility of XSLT?

Collapse
Posted by Stephen . on
The templating system works well for the simplest cases, but in the real world that doesn't happen too often.

For example...

The multiple tag is typically used to display tabular information, but it does nothing to help you enforce a common style for tables accross the whole site. Is this to be done page by page with dreamweaver? What happens when change is required?

The form system does provide a mechanism to controll the look and feel from one centralised place (that's why all those forms are blue..) but it doesn't allow any way to overide this for subsites or subsections etc.

The template master system is a great idea, but you can only hard code the location of the master in the filesystem, or a single master can be set for an entire subsite. Normal pages within a package can be overiden by placing files under the web root, but master templates are different.

Anyway, I'm wondering how Dreamweaver displays a page with any similarity to reality when that page is composed of 10 or so components, considering the various schemes ACS uses for choosing those components?

A modern ACS page is no longer the product of the designers fancy with some dynamic data filling the hole in the middle. It is composed of a header and footer, perhaps a login widget, some dynamic navigation display on the side, maybe a higher level tab display along the top, some user options, maybe they have admin privileges on this object, user feedback at the bottom of the page, some data pulled from a CMS, an ad chosen by user demographics etc. etc...  There are no chunks of HTML which can be conveniently churned out in a page designing tool. We're defining procs which are called with arguments, over and over again. It's nothing new, we were just confused because for a while we built 'pages'.

The twist that the web world seems to put on this is that of organization. I do think it's usefull to place the procs/includes not in one or more big files, but within the filesystem corrosponding somewhat to the URL hierarchy. URL hierarchy inheritence seems more useful than the traditional OO form...

Okay that's enough, looks like everyone else is happy with it...