[Typo3-dev] please discuss: TYPO3 needs a more flexibel data storage

[Robert Fink]

Hi!

Working with TYPO3 i found especially one thing annoying: The content element 
data is stored in tt_content using hardcoded HTML-Tags.

I would suggest thinking about changing the data structure inside tt_content 
to XML and inventing a XML DTD for TYPO3-content in a medium term period.

Using hardcoded HTML-Data to store data causes the following problems:

- Embedding content from external resources is difficult. Using XML image 
this: Pipe e.g. RSS-Data through a simple XSLT stylesheet to get 
TYPO3-DTD-valid XML-Data and use the function $this->T3XML_to_HTML($rssData) 
to get HTML.

- Export content to external formats is extermly difficult. In my opinion one 
of the most important features of future CMSs is to be open to a big variety 
of data formats. Just follow e.g. the PDF-Export discussion. The hardcoded 
HTML-structure makes it almost impossible to implement a flexibel PDF-Export 
feature. Using XML-Data this would shrink to writing a XSLT-Stylesheet. Also 
OpenOffice-export would be nice, huh? ;-)

Discussion welcome ;-)

  robert.