Re: Cleaning House

On 5/3/07 9:31 AM, "Anne van Kesteren" <annevk@opera.com> wrote:

> On Thu, 03 May 2007 15:21:58 +0200, Patrick H. Lauke
> <redux@splintered.co.uk> wrote:
>>> Forcing the use of a styled span is bad because styles are dangerous.
>>> It'd be akin to forcing someone to use Javascript to the same end. No,
>>> if a user typing into a WYSIWYG editor hits the "b" button, it should
>>> output a <b> tag.
>> 
>> And if a user hits the "centered text alignment" button, should it also
>> wrap a nice <center> around it? And if they want to change font, should
>> it just stick a <font> element in the code?
> 
> I don't see why not. If they want presentational markup, let them have it.
> Maskering it in some <span style> doesn't make it any better. Of course,
> it would be nice to have something "better" than a WYSIWYG editor, but so
> far work in that area hasn't progressed much as I understand it.

Actually Adobe Indesign has made a lot of progress in my opinion. Especially
in their use of 'styles'.
Character styles, paragraph styles, table styles, cell styles, and object
styles.
What they do is, basically you create a pdf with a couple dozen or a couple
hundred pages and you use these indesign style sheet things to control the
appearance of common elements across all those hundreds of pages instead of
having to go textbox to textbox highlighting things individually and messing
with the font menu. This comes in really useful for end of year reports that
usually have more than 3 people authoring the sections. Typically they use
MSWord and if they stick to some preset styles in Word then those styles can
be changed when the  msword file is imported into the book and the author
can continue to edit the word file to update the book. It's a real time
saver.

I think quark and microsoft word have something similar as well. MSWord also
calls it 'Styles'. I showed some office works last year how they could save
dozens of hours on their reports by using styles. They had this boss who
constantly had the most INSANE font change requests regarding headings and
underlined or bolded text.

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Received on Thursday, 3 May 2007 14:31:17 UTC