Re: HTML should not be a file format, but an output format

This discussion seems to have degenerated. I'm not going to respond to 
the attacks on why this group of experts dislikes Globetrotter. 
Globetrotter isn't designed for programmers. Here's the point: let's tell 
an average user that it's easy to break single doc into multiple pages. 
All you have to do is:

>From: Paul Prescod <papresco@calum.csclub.uwaterloo.ca>
>Of course actual useful code tends to be a little more complex, because
>you want to do more interesting things:
>
>(element div (make scroll scroll-title: 
>                  (data                 ; gets the data out of an
>element
>                      (node-list-first    ; gets the first element
>	                  (select-elements ;searches for particular elements
>	                      (descendants section) ; searches for "children
>elements"
>	                       "TITLE"))) ; with the GI "TITLE"

This is going to blow them away. And of course it won't work if they type 
it in exactly as above because the line breaks screw things up. Writing 
should not require programming.

Paul understands that users shouldn't do this stuff directly and they 
should use some kind of graphical front end. That's what Globetrotter is. 
It's one of many. One key difference between Globetrotter and others is 
that we view HTML as an output format not an internal format, which is 
what started this discussion. 

Should Globetrotter use XML as its internal format? It can't. Software is 
not written overnight and XML did not exist when we started. Will 
Globetrotter use XML soon? Not likely. Akimbo Systems is a very small 
company and we can't do everything. Does this mean we are stupid? No. I 
think what we have done is valuable, but clearly not to this audience.

Should it be recognized that HTML is (ultimately) not a language that 
should be written directly by average users? I hope so.

    --- Bruce Leban
    Akimbo Systems
    http://www.akimbo.com/globetrotter
    Publish on the web without learning HTML! (Really.)

Received on Sunday, 23 March 1997 12:26:44 UTC