Re: WYSIWYM editors

At 14:31 +0200 UTC, on 2007-03-18, Mihai Sucan wrote:

[...]

> What we can do:
>
> 1. proper frameworks can be developed
> Frameworks that generate better markup.

[...]

> 4. better content management systems

[...]

> 1. We can't teach every single web designer about proper HTML/CSS.

Agreed. FWIW, this realisation was the basis for The Web Repair Initiative,
which aims to improve the output of Automated Web Publication Systems (CMSs
and such), both through development of assitive tools and by
indexing/coordinating other people's work in this area. See
<http://webrepair.org/>. (We went public only quite recently. A lot still
needs to be done to get this on the rails. Help and feedback are welcome
through the public mailing list, to which you can subscribe from
<http://webrepair.org/06contact/>.)

[...]

> 3. We can't teach users of various content management systems to not use
> ugly colours, bold, font changes, what-not. They don't need to learn this.

Agreed. Ideally, such 'formatting' is either fixed (into proper markup)
behind the scenes or, much better yet, no option is provided to enter such
things. Part of why users enter such things is that they are forced to work
with WYSIWYG editors. A "semantic" or WYSIWYM editor could guide users to
enter more semantically rich markup.

Where it's possible to know what the editor meant, tools like Tidy can fix
the code. But often it is necessary for the user to make the right choice. We
need editors that help users make that right choice (subtly, without getting
in their way), instead of offering WYSIWYG options like bold, font changes,
etc.

[...]

> I wrote some PHP script which tries to clean lots of usual ugly markup.

When you decide to make that and Awebitor public, I'd appreciate it if you'd
let me know. Such tools deserve to be listed at
<http://webrepair.org/02strategy/01development/02tools.php>.


-- 
Sander Tekelenburg
The Web Repair Initiative: <http://webrepair.org/>

Received on Sunday, 18 March 2007 20:38:05 UTC