Pretty Good ?

I have a question and a statement.

Having a name like Fuzzy mandates that despite listing "question and
statement", I'm going to make the statement first.

I have been around these list a long time (we are talking years here).
*Never* have I seen such a calm, collected, open discussion of HTML
editors. And believe me, "HTML Editors" and "WUSIWUG -vs- Notepad" topics
have made their way around this list a few times!

Cool. Thanks for letting me be a part of this.

Now. That question!

What in the heck is "Pretty Good"?

I have seen some editors named in this discussion, that were labeled
"Pretty Good" (or even better) that I know for a complete and positive fact
write code so bad they often crash their own -built in- browsers. The list
of defects are so long that I won't even print them to show the owner of
the site I'm hired to fix. I've seen 'em CRASH the w3 parser (the validator
at the W3 site) when submitted.

In other words . . . speaking in terms of the validity of the code they
write, they STINK.

Now, obviously, if the criteria for judging "Pretty Good" is ease of use .
. . Holy Cow, there are indeed, some *excellent* canned editors out there !!

So . . . 

What do you think?

Of course, this opinion is from a guy by the name of Fuzzy, but . . . 

It depends on your target demographics for what you are publishing. Yes,
ladies and gentlemen (no slander intended), it depends not on you, but your
audience.

I pray that in my next life I will come back as someone blessed with a
-huge- intRAnet that I can "play" with. Yea, you know, I know *exactly* who
is looking, and which browser/OS I'm dealing with. Wow. Wouldn't life be
grand? There probably wouldn't be a validated document in the works - and I
would enjoy every byte of it <grin>.

But hey, like they say: This is the real world, and sometimes it creates
serious negative pressure (it sucks) - deal with it.

To deal with it, I have adopted a philosophy (I'll be you would have never
guessed that).

Know your audience. Write to your audience. Give the customer the best code
they can buy to meet the needs of those viewers.

By "best" I mean simply: Code that works effectively and predictably for
-everyone-. Currently, to my knowledge, there is only one way to do that.

Write the code by whatever means you choose. Post it somewhere (anywhere).
Go to the W3 validator <http://validator.w3.org/> and submit the URL for
the file you just posted a minute ago.

When the result of this comes back: "Below are the results of attempting to
parse this document with an SGML parser. 

    No errors found!
Congratulations, this document validates as the document type specified! "
you have found the Holy Grail. 

Please, someone correct me if I'm wrong here, but I don't think there is a
WUSIWUG program out right now that can do that. If there is ~~please~~ post
a sample to  have a look at!

So . . . 

What in the heck is "Pretty Good"?

:-)
Fuzzy
__________________________________________________________________
Captain F.M. O'Lary
webmaster(at)canopy.net
sysop(at)mail.ruediger.leon.k12.fl.us
sysop(at)mail.woodville.leon.k12.fl.us
Member of the HTML Writers Guild and 
International Webmasters Association
------------------------------------------------------------------

HTML: hwg-basics mailing list archives, maintained by Webmasters @ IWA