[Dev] Zaobao comments

[Ted Leung]

This is mostly for Katie and Alec, but...

I took some time to go poking around the Zaobao parcel, and I have some 
comments.

It's interesting to note that the two parcel.xml files take up about 
13k, and the python files (RSSData.py, blocks.py, ZaoBaoWakeupCall) 
take up about 8k.  I suppose that I should be happy that the "data" 
definitions take up more space than the behavioral code (not counting 
the honking feedparser).  Except that the parcel.xml is really pretty 
verbose.   I don't have many suggestions for the schema/parcel.xml 
file.  It seems like it's pretty much doing the minimum amount of work. 
  The main parcel.xml is a different story.

The main parcel.xml has lots of items in it -- like 3 or even 4 items 
for each ContentDetailItem.  Some of those items are reusable, and 
might eventually migrate into the framework, but it seems like a lot.  
It might be worthwhile to have some custom syntax for ContentDetailItem 
that would allow us to build some of these common situations more 
quickly -- a lot of the items are StaticTextItems, for example.

When you "install" Zaobao, you get a new menu entry under File->New 
Item, to create a new ZaoBao channel.  This is the only menu 
introduction that I saw.  I'm assuming that this happened because 
RSSChannel is a subkind of ItemCollection?  It's a little bit of a 
mystery to me as to how that menu item got there.   In general, I'm 
unclear as to how a parcel would introduce menu items and wire them up.

When we create a Zaobao channel, we create an itemcolletion for it.  
What would we do if we wanted all RSSItems to go into a single 
ItemCollection (RSSChannel or not)?  If we did that, it looks to me 
like we can't easily take an RSSItem and find its RSSChannel 
(bidirectional ref on items would help here).

I see that we are rendering the body of an RSSItem using 
osaf.framework.blocks.detail.Detail.HTMLDetailArea.  Is the widget 
behind this Mozilla based or something else?

I know this is out of scope for 0.5, but I'm curious about the plan for 
allowing a custom summary table item/view.  I can imagine a summary 
view that also shows a few lines of the RSSItem body, for example.

I'll probably have some more questions later...

Ted