- From: Robert J Burns <rob@robburns.com>
- Date: Sun, 15 Feb 2009 15:43:40 -0600
- To: Leif Halvard Silli <lhs@malform.no>
- Cc: "Philip TAYLOR (Ret'd)" <P.Taylor@Rhul.Ac.Uk>, Andrew Fedoniouk <news@terrainformatica.com>, public-html@w3.org
Hi Philip and Leif, On Feb 15, 2009, at 11:34 AM, Leif Halvard Silli wrote: > Philip TAYLOR (Ret'd) 2009-02-15 17.24: >> 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 > [...] >> 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. > > For a person like Andrew, which is in the business of making HTML > WYSIWYG editors, this is a fruitless point, I guess. > > A good WYSIWYG editor may help many to write /more/ structured. > > And, knowing that you use SeaMoneky: I use Thunderbird, and one > reason for doing so is because it lets me use a WYSIWYG HTML editor > during writing. Thunderbird will convert this to text when it sends > it out, though (depending on the configuration, of course). E.g. it > has a useful conversion from WYSIWYG HTML lists to text lists ... > And also from STRONG (or bold) to *bold* etc. > > Regardless of editor: one has to know what one is doing. I think part of the problem here is the misuse of the term WYSIWYG which has unfortunately taken hold specifically in the area of HTML editing. What I would call this is GUI / Visual editing and not really WYSIWYG. WYSIWYG is more a term applied to rendering and rasterization. The editing of HTML however, can most certainly be visual in terms of selectable objects (elements, ranges, etc.) that have semantics applied to them (or un-applied from them) with menus, toolbars, and keyboard commands etc. In other words editing where the pre-parsed text source is not edited directly, but instead the user interacts directly with DOM objects. We never called that WYSIWYG editing before, so I'm not sure why it now gets called that with HTML (which as you say is not necessarily though can be WYSIWYG). Having said that I very much disagree with what Andrew is saying about visual editing of HTMl content. I've suggested in the past that we include a chapter to guide visual editing tools, but that has been a low priority. My understanding is that HTML began as a visually edited platform using NextSTEP tools somewhat like todays cocoa text system in Mac OS X. The problem is not that HTML cannot be edited visually without resorting to source editing. Instead the problem is the attempt to treat the editing the same as non-hierarchical rich text formats (such as RTF). With those RTF-like tools there is no hierarchy within a document. Instead various substrings are simply assigned styling attributes. In other words, those formats do not have a paragraph with a bold run of text in the middle, but rather the paragraph starts with a run of Roman text, followed by the bold text and then the plain Roman text again. So converting from an RTF-like format to HTML requires some heuristic analysis to produce a hierarchical HTML document. Going the opposite direction is much simpler since there's actually more information encoded in the hierarchy than in the RTF- like format (i.e., the hierarchical relations are expressed in the document rather than inferred by heuristics). The various plain text syntax that have been invented are an utter disaster. We should never look to those to highlight worthwhile use cases. Compare Apple's wiki software with MoinMoin or MediaWiki and you'll understand what I mean. I'm not at all clear what the proposed 'text' element seeks to address. A major problem already is that users have a variety of structural text containers to edit within so adding another seems to me to add even more confusion. Take care, Rob
Received on Sunday, 15 February 2009 21:44:52 UTC