- From: Daniel Glazman <daniel.glazman@disruptive-innovations.com>
- Date: Sun, 18 Mar 2007 09:35:29 +0100
- To: Daniel Glazman <daniel.glazman@disruptive-innovations.com>
- Cc: Marcos Caceres <m.caceres@qut.edu.au>, Robert Accettura <robert@accettura.com>, public-html@w3.org
On 18/03/2007 09:05, Daniel Glazman wrote:
>
> If you really want to make markup editors percolate into the real world,
> a world that does not care about the technical side because they
> SHOULD NOT have to care about it, then you can't focus on students.
Let me add one thing to that :
Microsoft XML products are successful (Jean Paoli told me a US state
police is using/composing XML-based forms in their cars) because XML
is totally hidden, because no knowledge of XML is required, because
everyone knows what's a form while nobody knows what's an XML tag.
Jean Paoli and I, in a former professionnal life, tried to teach the
very basis of markup language and the "spirit" of content/presentation
separation to document authors and users on a french governmental site.
Hopeless, totally hopeless. There were more phone calls to our hotline
AFTER the training than before...
The only reason why HTML isn't able to replace PDF on the Web is styles.
CSS can't offer all the richness of PostScript or PDF.
Our Web, the one millions of people use every day, is stylistic, like it
or not. Only a microscropic minority see/care about semantics. So the
only option is to hide semantics, hide markup and make the editor so
simple, so intuitive, so "magic" people don't have to care about
semantics and markup to code nice web pages.
The model ? The old very old MacWrite ; nobody ever needed more than 5
minutes to understand how MacWrite worked.
Hey, even TBL uses Nvu, right ?-)
</Daniel>
Received on Sunday, 18 March 2007 08:35:38 UTC