Re: General Question about Cocoon

[Perry Molendijk]

Educate the users and make them feel important! Most of those content providers use Word or other tools, and don't even know how to use those properly so forget about preaching them the wonders of XML; teach them how to use a simple Word template PROPERLY. Then get some sort of conversion tools to create the XML, I find upCast [www.infinity-loop.com] and Logictran [http://www.logictran.com/] usefull tools but IBM has one and a few others too.   Although upCast lacks some customisability it allows for tables, bold text and links without too much need for complicated checking and tweaking.   Perry Molendijk   ----- Original Message ----- From: Gabriele Domenichini To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Monday, May 28, 2001 4:59 PM Subject: R: General Question about Cocoon I'm tring to implement that design but I have the same old problem: How can make users compile the content part of the syste without a tool which could allow them to make a minimal formatting such as <b/> when word 2000 is such a bad tool to produce xhtml code and there are not good end-user xhtml tools (I've tried also xmetal and xml spy but they are not good for my users)?  Does anyone of you have a solution? -----Messaggio originale----- Da: Perry Molendijk [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Inviato: venerd́ 25 maggio 2001 16.17 A: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Oggetto: Re: General Question about Cocoon I am surprised how XSLT is not embraced with more enthusiasm by designers because it allows them to keep complete control of their designs while developers can concentrate on producing data to fill in the gaps.   This article at xml.com: http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2000/07/26/xslt/xsltstyle.html explains a pretty neat way to make xml / xsl work for designers. I spend a lot of time as piggy in the middle argueing with designers that over-complex GUIs and bad html don't make a developers job any easier and on the other side trying to explain to developers that the addition of a bold dark green font is not acceptable when the corporate colours are reds and white.   The method /  techniques described by the auther allows designers to use their fav WYSIWYG tools, of which Dreamweaver is a prefered choice. You can configure it to produce xhtml and its third party tag config files are a neat way to add custom tags. Developers produce the data in xml format and XSL merges it all together.   The latest release of MS xml parser should keep designers happy enough for previewing their work, while developers can use Cocoon; at the end of the day we are using standards here and they should be portable :-).   Perry Molendijk     ----- Original Message ----- From: Ulrich Mayring To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Friday, May 25, 2001 6:22 PM Subject: Re: General Question about Cocoon "Piroumian, Konstantin" wrote: > > They are for different purposes: Dreamweaver or FrontPage are more > convenient for page design and layout definition (e.g., to choose a good > color scheme) and most web developers use them only to get some HTML from > them and put into their hand-coded files. Exactly. That's why I recommended that the designer sends the developer some HTML (in whatever way he produced it) and the developer puts it into his hand-coded stylesheet.   > Cocoon can be useful for a collection of documents too. If you need > customized views of your documents, depending on the language, user agent > (browser). Also, you can provide you documents in different formats: HTML, > WML, PDF, Plain text, even RTF, maybe MS Word and Excel. This is a complete application, not merely a document store :) Ulrich -- Ulrich Mayring DENIC eG, Systementwicklung --------------------------------------------------------------------- Please check that your question has not already been answered in the FAQ before posting. <http://xml.apache.org/cocoon/faqs.html> To unsubscribe, e-mail: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> For additional commands, e-mail: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>