Re: New Topic WYSIWYG

Christopher Casey <mirage5(at)ix.netcom.com> wrote:
>HTML is extremely flexible. A computer program isn't. Speaking as a
>programmer who's had a go-round or two with this ... the problem isn't so
>much that the programs put out nasty HTML code as that it's darn hard to
>create a program that creates good, solid, optimized code of *any* kind.
The

[snip]

I can't agree with this. I wrote my own HTML editor when my department
needed a way for several non-HTML-familiar writers to produce web pages
quickly. I wrote it to produce 100% compliant HTML 4 and use CSS1. It took
me about a day and half. I do not consider myself a programmer (it's just
something I dabble with), so I expect real programmers could knock up
something similar in their sleep.

Ok, I cheated a bit. I didn't write the editor from scratch. I used
Microsoft Word and wrote a WordBasic macro that maps Word document
formatting and styles to HTML tags (including class information where
necessary) and outputs the whole document as a text file. It works, it's
compliant, and the code is beautifully clean (if I may say so).

But what I did was the *easy* part of the editor. If the companies that
write editors are smart enough to write a complete WYSIWYG front end
(something I wouldn't even know how to start), they should also be smart
enough to get the HTML output right.

The thing is, HTML isn't terifically complex. There are only a few rules,
really, and they are quite easily reduced to some simple algorithms. SGML
(and therefore HTML) was designed to be machine-readable, not
human-readable.

So, why can't they get it right? I like the notion that it is in a company's
interests to produce code that only their browser can render. That is good
marketing sense, but the excuse doesn't work for all of them. And some of
the awful "bloat" code that some editors gratuitously produce isn't
optimised for ANY browser!

A mystery to me...


--
David Meadows [ Technical Writer | Information Developer ]
DNRC Minister for Littorasy * david(at)heroes.force9.co.uk
"Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it!
 Boldness has genius, power and magic in it." --Goethe

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