Re: More questions about Lotus notes and Domino

Rich,

>I'm still a bit unclear as to the relationship between Notes and Domino.
>Which is the publishing environment? I've been assuming that Domino is
Lotus'
>webserver, similar to Apatchy and etc. It just serves pages. The
>publishing environment is Notes.

Yes, you are correct, Domino is the WEB SERVER.

Lotus Notes is a groupware product (which includes email), but it also
performs the role of a WEB EDITOR.

>Notes provides a way to specify the look and feel of the
>site and takes care of generating the HTML from the specifications.

Notes itself doesn't generate the HTML. This is done by Domino. Basically,
the information you create
in Notes is created as RTF  (rich text format  - much like with Word), and
once created, it sits on Domino in a
database as RTF. When someone views the document on Domino, Domino adds
HTML to the document (only
while the document is being viewed.)

The beauty of the RTF method is that you can copy and paste an Excel
spreadsheet for instance, and it renders perfectly
on the web.

>How much control over the HTML being generated does the designer have?

The lawlink site is a based on a Notes template that I designed. Within
this notes template, I have added HTML for all the important design
features. This html is hidden
from the webpage authors who use this template.

The HTML components include the header, the background image, the footer
and the body tag. See the following as an example:

http://www.lawlink.nsw.gov.au/vaw

Therefore,  I have minimised what Domino has to render into HTML, in the
view that this will eliminate the risk of Domino rendering certain things
inaccessibly.

However, Domino still renders the following:

*All text sizes and colours.
*All tables.
*Some of the graphics in the body (I use html to insert some graphics, and
Notes for others, depending on certain parameters---> eg, Notes graphics
have colours restricted to the Notes pallette.)
*All links, apart from header and footer.
*As I do not create views as webpages (ie, different columns of data), the
lawlink site rarely has twisties.

The only pages that have twisties are databases that were specifically
designed for an internal environment, and then we tried to re-designed them
for the web.

View the following as an example:

http://www.lawlink.nsw.gov.au/95-96rec.nsf/(Web+Version+By+Recommendation)?
OpenView


Hope that helps.

Robert Savellis

Received on Sunday, 9 August 1998 22:02:30 UTC