RE: HTML Action Item 54 - ...draft text for HTML 5 spec to require producers/authors to include @alt on img elements.

Frederico -

You are right, and I apologize; I should not have called FCK Editor a
"garbage tool". The tool itself seems fairly decent considering the
constraints it operates within (namely, client side code in a Web browser
that seems to work fine in all browsers, no small feat). A better phrasing
that more accurately reflects my thoughts and intentions would have been
"tools like FCK Editor that produce poor HTML". The fact is, FCK Editor (and
many other tools, both within Web apps and not) have been producing obsolete
and invalid HTML for quite some time; in this case, <font> has been obsolete
for 7 or 8 years before your tools finally stopped using it. While your
message clearly shows the technical reasons behind this, it really
highlights the problem that we have here. FCK Editor is probably responsible
for more HTML generation in a week or two than every plain text editor on
the planet in a year. So when it (or any other tool) produces HTML that
doesn't meet the spec, there is a problem.

In this case, you cite a technical hurdle as being the cause of the bad
HTML. But overall, what can we do to change the HTML spec so that it is
easier for tool creators to write tools that adhere to it? Simply put, if
the people working on tools cannot (or will not) produce tools that generate
not just syntactically correct, but really good HTML, then the HTML spec is
only aimed at the few who hand edit, which is not an acceptable situation.

So, from your perspective (using your parenthesis on my inappropriate
comment as a springboard), what can we do to help you make a tool that works
better?

J.Ja

-----Original Message-----
From: public-html-request@w3.org [mailto:public-html-request@w3.org] On
Behalf Of Frederico Caldeira Knabben
Sent: Tuesday, May 13, 2008 5:41 AM
To: public-html@w3.org
Cc: j_james@mindspring.com
Subject: RE: HTML Action Item 54 - ...draft text for HTML 5 spec to require
producers/authors to include @alt on img elements.


Sorry for opening parenthesis on this discussion. I just want to give a bit
more precision over Justin's comments. People out there take public
conversations as sacrosanct references, and so it is important to take good
care when we are talking openly.

Let me take the relevant bytes from Justin's text:

> The problem is garbage tools like FCK Editor that still use <font>

This phrase, other than being outdated, is offensive. It just throws away
all the hard work we are doing behind FCKeditor. The exact same thing can be
said in other ways. But this is irrelevant, anyway.

The fact is that browsers based text editors, as the name says, use browser
features to execute editing operations, include formatting. The well
know/unknown execCommand function. The problem is that browsers, not all of
them, use <font> tags for many commands available for that function,
including font face, size and color. So, first of all, let's point the
finger to the right place.

During the last year, we've decided abandoning the execCommand function
because of such problems, providing also consistency among all browsers. The
result of it has been released with FCKeditor 2.5, published on November
2007 (6 months ago). Just try our online demo... no <font> tags there:
http://www.fckeditor.net/demo

Also, with FCKeditor you can achieve unique things, like the following:
http://www.fckeditor.net/nightly/fckeditor/_samples/html/sample14.html

In the above sample, almost everything is done with CSS classes, including
font attributes, colors and alignments.

Anyway... just tried to give a bit more info, and underline that words can
easily kill things in this world wide open web.

Closing the parenthesis.

Frederico Caldeira Knabben
Project Manager, FCKeditor
----
http://www.fckeditor.net

Received on Tuesday, 13 May 2008 15:56:37 UTC