Re: Web Design

At 11:47 p.m. 11/29/98 -0000, David Meadows wrote:
>I could create a web page in two minutes without writing a single line of
>HTML. You don't need to know any of the above.
>[...] You have GUI tools. You can drag-and-drop, apply styles, do all sorts of
>clever stuff. Creating a HTML page is as easy as writing a letter in a word
>processor. A basic knowledge of the tool would be advantageous, but
>knowledge of HTML is superfluous.

With the caveat that, at the moment, _most_ web authoring tools
produce pretty crappy HTML, although they're continuing to improve
as time goes by.

"Crappy" means improper HTML (that may or may not work depending on
how a user agent wants to handle it; this is why standards adherence
is important) as well as inaccessible HTML (few GUI tools actually
prompt you for ALT, TITLE, and LONGDESC).

If this is acceptable to the web page author -- and for some people
it may indeed be so -- then yes, the statement is true.  Well, even
if it's not acceptable, you've still made a web page; it just may
not be a very good one.

(I've found Hot Metal Pro, for Windows 9*/NT, to be quite good at
making decent HTML, almost as good as mine.  I recommend Netscape
Composer at work to people who I don't expect to make a decent
page anyway, and Hot Metal Pro to anyone who'll be doing serious
web work.)

--
Kynn Bartlett  <kynn(at)idyllmtn.com>             http://www.idyllmtn.com/~kynn/
Chief Technologist & Co-Owner, Idyll Mountain Internet; Fullerton, California
Enroll now for web accessibility with HTML 4.0!   http://www.hwg.org/classes/
The voice of the future?   http://www.hwg.org/opcenter/w3c/voicebrowsers.html

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