Forum OpenACS Development: Re: Idea: New Content Paradigm

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Posted by Ola Hansson on
It seems inevitable that, in the future, the fine details of a real world document will be represented in a structured markup language, not as attributes in a database table. How is OpenACS going to address this issue?
The same way we're addressing it today I'd guess.

I.e., for the time being "OpenACS" represents most of its documents, a.k.a. pages, in HTML. What happens at least most of the time is that some of the resulting markup is being defined in the ADP template by the designer and that some of it were defined by the content contributor. That "user provided" content might include markup too - I've got a pair of <blockquote> tags in here for instance 😉 ...

If this is strange or bad in any way, I haven't noticed it yet.

If in the future XML or some other structured markup language becomes the norm, we would have to a) change the markup in the templates from HTML to ?ML, and b) teach the users to use the new markup.

The reason the body of the forum posting or the description of the bug is divided into further parts is that only the author of that piece of the content would know what it should look like.

Oh well, I probably missed your point anyway...

Or, are you saying that we should get rid of all columns but one in a "articles" table (say) and store all the article attributes together with the markup in that column and then duplicate the markup for all rows? Hardly. 😊

Can you elaborate a bit? This is interesting.