Re: Design aims of XHTML 2.0

Lachlan Hunt <lhunt07@postoffice.csu.edu.au> writes:

> The best thing that authoring tools could do to improve usability and
> put more focus onto structure rather than formatting would be to
> remove the menus and buttons from the tool bar such as font, font
> size, bold, italic, underline, strike through, line spacing,
> etc... (ie. anything similar to a deprecated HTML element)

AOL! Couldn't agree more.

> and implement something similar to, but still more structure oriented
> than, the Styles and Formatting Task Pane in M$ Office XP.

And specifically, it should never be called or spoken of as anything
like "Styles and Formatting". M$ Word uses no or at best very little
semantics -- a style is (almost) nothing more than an arbitrary group of
presentational attributes.

> If something like this listed all the available elements (perhaps
> listing only, or disabling, elements that aren't allowed to be used.
> (eg. preventing block elements within inline elements).

And the elements in the text must also be shown in a clear and
unambiguous way. My idea of how to do this, is to show some sort of
symbol ("element point") at the start and end of each element. It should
also be possible to move element points, thus in- or decreasing the
scope of a selected element in either direction.

> Implementing stylesheets in a GUI is still something, from my
> experience, that really needs a lot more work done.

Not very important, imo (as long as it is editors, not viewers/browsers
we are talking about).

-- 
Øystein Skartsæterhagen

Received on Monday, 3 November 2003 16:38:13 UTC