Re: Disturbing trend in tables

Anne,

My point is not that it's impossible to make perfectly good html with Front
Page--as I said, I've never used it, so I have to take your word--but rather
that people who don't understand the difference between a Word document and
an html page are unlikely to make good html--whatever tool they're using.

Conversely, people who do understand what they are doing, can likely use any
tool and come up with good html.

Very simple concrete example:
Me, a few years ago, "let's see I want to put a title...hmm, how do I make
it big? Ah, font size! Now, where's the bold? Ah great!" And what I had
(courtesy of my 
handy-dandy-WYSISYG-trying-to-convince-me-it's-a-word-processor) was:

<font size="6"><b>Title of this page</b></font>.

And didn't it look nice on my new fangled copy of Netscape 2?

Only after I put in some effort to try to understand what was going on under
the hood did I start to realize what the problem was. <font
size="6"><b>Title of this page</b></font> is not the same as <h1>Title of
this page</h1>. When Lynx comes across the second example, it understands
that it's a header because the html tells it so. When it comes across the
first, it has no idea that the author intended it to be a header.

Now some folks might argue that it's no big deal if the headers are
indicated. That you can use the page just fine without that extra
organizational information. But if I'm an author of text, and I decide my
text needs that informational structuring, then it probably does. But if I
don't know what I'm doing, and if I don't understand the fundamental
difference between a Word document and an html file, then I am quite likely
to myself in the foot.

That's what I mean, Anne. It's not the tool; it's the understanding. As
Charles has pointed out, with a little bit of understanding and simple text
editor, you can easily create perfectly wonderful html pages.

Davey Leslie 


Thus spake Anne Pemberton on 01.1.19 9:06 AM at apembert@crosslink.net:

> At 10:26 PM 1/18/01 +0900, Davey Leslie wrote:
>> What it looks like to me is that when folks haven't grasped the fundamental
>> differences between a Word document and an html page, what usually comes out
>> a WYSIWYG is far from useable on, say, text-browsers like Lynx.
> 
> I've made pages in Front Page that did just fine in lynx when I tested them
> (a few years ago, when VA.PEN still supported lynx) ... What specifically
> makes them unusable?
> 
> Anne
> 
> 

-- 
"Keep your monkey up!"
Davey Leslie 
davey@inx-jp.org

Received on Friday, 19 January 2001 02:04:24 UTC