Separation of concerns?

[Andrew Watt]

I have a (multi-part) question about the suggested "separation of concerns" that it is proposed that Cocoon achieves.

I would like to ask how Cocoon is being used in a production environment, specifically how does separation of roles work out. Does it actually work in practice? How easy is it in production settings to find "graphics designers" who are also fluent in XSLT?

Aren't such bi-skilled people essential to achieve the implementation of the "style" concern? Or, in practice, are "real" designers and "real" XSLT coders working together on the XSLT stylesheets?

I guess that the suspicion that is lurking at the back of my mind is that the "confusion of concerns" (to coin a phrase) is, to some extent, being shuffled off into the "style" box. Of course, that may be a signficant improvement over other workflows.

I can see pretty clearly the cleanness of the current approach for programmers/administrators ... designers don't touch the content nor the sitemaps ... but I do have slight doubts about the cleanness of the style concern. Or maybe my doubt is about the realisticness of finding graphics designers comfortable to code in XSLT.

I notice, too, that style is little mentioned in the online documentation and doesn't appear as a term in the index of the Langham/Ziegeler book. That makes me wonder if others either have doubts too about the style concern or, perhaps, haven't looked (yet?) in a detailed way at how this will work.

I wonder if what has mostly been happening up to now is XSLT-coders dabbling with design? :)

I would be interested in any stories about the reactions of "pure" graphics designers in a production setting when first faced with the Cocoon approach and how they and, I suspect, XSLT-programmer colleagues actually worked out a practical workflow.

Andrew Watt


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