Re: The Conflicting Notions of Ease of Use and Need for Authoring Tools

> Orion and Daniel discuss ease of use of CSS for web authors, you seem to

I think Orion is talking about ease of use by sophisticated authors,
who understand programming language concepts, and Daniel is talking
about ease of use by the man in the street.

> discuss something quite different like ease of implementation of CSS, or
> how much effort it takes to fully understand all of CSS. It seems you

Probably: how much effort it takes to understand the consequences of
what you write, because the cascade means that authors using Orion's
features must understand how the interact with legacy CSS, if they are
to use them properly.  The higher level functions don't remove the need
of a competent designer to understand the lower level ones.

I'm not sure that there is any truly WYSIWYG way of editing styles themselves,
as you can't necessarily represent all the different selector combinations.
Even with the simpler style sheet model of MS Word, very few people actually
use style sheets and I've found that, once one throws in "based on", it is
almost always the case that one needs to work directly with the style 
description, rather than style something then update its style sheet 
entry from the ad hoc changes.

Received on Thursday, 30 December 2004 07:52:43 UTC