Re: need a new tag

At 22:27 +0100 13/05/2001, David Woolley wrote:
>  >
>>  Definitely OT for this list: much as I certainly teach Styles for
>>  Word, Pagemaker and HTML there's still a need in Word to start off
>
>Not really.  It is the ease of teaching WYSIWYG formatting that results
>in virtually no HTML authors actually understanding HTML!

Well, horses for courses. I totally agree that when teaching HTML one 
should go straight to stylesheets and structure and not teach random 
bolding etc.

>I don't think that structure is difficult to teach, except to people
>who have already learnt with tools that don't directly support it.
>Someone who is used to using manual typewriters will naturally try
>to underline headings, and someone who has used Write will think in
>terms of bolding text to create a heading, so pragmatic considerations
>may mean that you have to provide them with a migration path.  However
>it is too easy to use the same path for learners who don't have
>preconceptions; the result is that people are being continually taught
>how to violate most of the priority 2 WCAG rules.

In terms of teaching MS Word, which is what my web pages are about, I 
don't see any problem with first teaching someone how to select text 
and apply bold, colours etc and then later moving to teach 
stylesheets. The media are quite different.

When I create a web page I can reasonable expect that a computer will 
mediate my communication and software and hardware will render my 
page as one or many of: visual text and graphics, spoken words, 
braille, in my language or another language. Software could create a 
table of contents or perhaps summarise my text.

When I use MS Word to type a letter to my Aunty Flo and print it 
ready for posting or faxing, I don't think that my use of bold or 
otherwise has much relevance to anything beyond how I want that page 
to look.

OTOH: when a "typist" in a government department uses MS Word to type 
up a briefing paper which will then be passed electronically to an 
analyst for further comment and editing, incorrect typing and failure 
to use Stylesheets can be devastatingly wasteful of resources.

I think we could now firmly return to the topic of HTML which is 
where this discussion began.



Cheers,

Miraz

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Received on Sunday, 13 May 2001 18:33:36 UTC