- From: Henri Sivonen <hsivonen@iki.fi>
- Date: Mon, 12 May 2008 09:44:25 +0300
- To: "Justin James" <j_james@mindspring.com>
- Cc: "'Philip Taylor'" <pjt47@cam.ac.uk>, <public-html@w3.org>
On May 12, 2008, at 08:37 , Justin James wrote: > Why is it, 15 years after HTML hit the scene, no one interested in > making valid HTML that is also good, clean HTML uses a WYSIWYG > system? Because the tools stink, and we all know it. You can blame the tools all you want but the basic problem is that purporting to encode semantics is a paradigm mismatch with editing presentation. And many tool vendors (correctly, IMO) seem to believe that the preference of a sizable part of potential customers is to edit presentation--not to edit semantics. > This is an unacceptable state of affairs. If email worked this way, > the computer revolution would have never happened. text/plain; format=flowed has exactly one semantic construct: blockquote. That construct is fundamental to email and automatable by mail user agents most of the time. The rest of text/plain; format=flowed is presentational, so naturally the format is a better match for UIs designed for presentational editing. (Aside: Email messages as a whole also have supplementary user-entered data that is supposed to be mandatory: Subject. And as we all know, software cannot force people to write a subject. However, other people can make subject writing more compelling if you know that by not writing a subject you are more likely to get your message ignored as spam.) -- Henri Sivonen hsivonen@iki.fi http://hsivonen.iki.fi/
Received on Monday, 12 May 2008 06:45:10 UTC