Re: 9. WYSIWYG editor (enforcing the signature)

On Fri, Aug 03, 2007 at 12:46:38PM +0300, Mihai Sucan wrote:

> Having experience with working on my own WYSIWYG editor, I believe the
> aformentioned requirement is not really applicable. As in, I wouldn't like
> to include the suggested string. Here's a simple reason: my CMS generates
> correct, semantical markup (or tries to do so). The *strict* content of
> the pages is all generated by my WYSIWYG editor, found in the CMS. Having
> the "(WYSIWYG editor)" mention in the "generator" meta-tag does not really
> reflect the reality, when someone looks into the page code, either
> personally, or with a parser. For example, the blog pages are mostly
> generated by the blog engine, and only the article itself is edited with
> the WYSIWYG tool. The user never edits *the entire* page with the WYSIWYG
> editor. The page is not generated by the tool, it's not the result of any
> "silly hacks" in the WYSIWYG world. Obviously, I consider the signature
> appropriate for documents entirely generated by WYSIWYG editors, like NVU,
> Dreamweaver and such.

A further difficulty is that "WYSIWYG editor" won't catch documents converted
from the file formats of word processors and other applications that aren't
conducive to the generation of semantically correct markup. If the file
converter is a stand-alone tool then it isn't a WYSIWYG editor, even if the
file being converted was written in one.

I am sympathetic to the idea of alerting HTML processors to documents in which
the markup is likely to be semantically non-conformant, but singling out
WYSIWYG editors for this purpose doesn't draw the boundary accurately.

Perhaps a "nonstrict" annotation would be better, which applies to HTML
documents created by any application where the author can't exercise control
over the HTML markup at the element and attribute level, for example if the
user interface doesn't expose UI options that are mapped one-to-one with HTML
document structures.

Received on Friday, 3 August 2007 10:27:17 UTC