- From: Philip TAYLOR (Ret'd) <P.Taylor@Rhul.Ac.Uk>
- Date: Sun, 15 Feb 2009 16:24:36 +0000
- To: Andrew Fedoniouk <news@terrainformatica.com>
- CC: public-html@w3.org
Returning from the digression (to the use of HTML and RTF for e-mail) to Andrew's deeper point : Andrew Fedoniouk wrote: > Having it in place will help to deal with the text in WYSIWYG editors Do you believe that "WYSIWYG editing" and "HTML" are actually compatible concepts, rather than being oxymoronic when juxtaposed ? I do not. HTML is a language in which one expresses the structure of a document : in order for that structure to gain a physical realisation, it has to be rendered. As the HTML specification (quite rightly) leaves the /detail/ of the rendering unspecified (it reads, in part [1], "User agents are not required present HTML documents in any particular way", any attempt to edit HTML documents in a WYSIWYG manner is not only doomed to failure but is actually a very dangerous practice (in the sense that it may lead an author to believe that he/she has control over the appearance of the final rendered document). In reality, the rendering of any given HTML document may vary enormously from instantation to instantiation, depending on the user's preferred window geometry, font, base font size, style-sheet and so on, let alone the issues of whether or not he/she elects to allow images to be displayed and/or scripts to be executed. If you want WYSIWYG editing, then I seriously suggest that you should not be considering HTML at all, at least in terms of what you eventually serve to your end- reader; by all means use HTML and CSS as intermediates, but then render the resulting code within a constrained environment and serve the results using a page-description language such as Adobe PDF. Philip TAYLOR -------- [1] The full text reads "User agents are not required present HTML documents in any particular way. However, this section provides a set of suggestions for rendering HTML documents that, if followed, are likely to lead to a user experience that closely resembles the experience intended by the documents' authors. So as to avoid confusion regarding the normativity of this section, RFC2119 terms have not been used. Instead, the term "expected" is used to indicate behavior that will lead to this experience."
Received on Sunday, 15 February 2009 16:25:20 UTC