RE: NVU, child of Mozilla Composer (Windows & Linux)

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Charles McCathieNevile [mailto:charles@sidar.org]
>
> I would encourage anyone with skills in accessibility and programming
> to get involved in NVU. Daniel Glazman, the lead developer, is (in my
> opinion and experience) an intelligent, open, standards-oriented
> accessibility-friendly developer. He is responsible for some of the
> accessibility improvements in Netscape/Mozilla composer, occasionally
> at the urging of accessibility people.
>
> But like any open source project, the most helpful thing is
> documentation or code. Failing that, thorough testing, and clear
> explanation of what is missing, backed by a reasonably solid functional
> knowledge of the systems involved...
>
> cheers
>
> Chaals
>


I don't know about the rest of you on this list, but I'm really disappointed
with the quality of WYSIWYG based editors and the markup they generate.  I
don't understand why it is so bad.  I'm disappointed in most of our tools
actually.

When you compare similar design tools for software development produced by
the major companies in those areas, like MS, Borland, etc, the code
generated is of a significant higher quality.

What seems to happen here is that the developers are working with the actual
code they are generating.  But it seems the same is not apparent when
hypertext marked up is generated.  In the tech books I read, the HTML
examples are nearly always quirks mode HTML, that suggests to me the type of
code code-monkeys often tend to produce, although there are quite a few
exceptions, but not the norm.

I also feel it's really important to have a free OSS companion WYSIWYG
editor out there for users to be able to update sites that have been
developed by standards compliant developers.

I really feel authoring tools need some facility to be able to only allow
users to update the content within certain <DIV> tags... ie <DIV
id="content">  Something like this anyway, I don't know, but some way that
users can use a WYSIWYG editor to update content, for the software to ignore
all the other markup and protect it, and also produce valid markup for any
user.

Actually, to tell the truth, I don't think it is possible. To my way of
thinking, I'd prefer to see the death of direct methods of editing HTML, as
the whole process does not comply with any good QA or proper CMS workflow or
versioning.  I think the future is in WYSIWYG XML editors publishing to
backend transforming systems.

But then again, most users are not going to bother with that when they can
just hack with a WYSIWYG editor.

So it come full circle back to needing a good free OSS tool.  And this one
seems like the best bet.  If it can achieve the same quality as Mozilla,
then that to me is a very big success, worth the effort.

I'll try and get involved.  I don't mind a bit of lost time and
productivity, which is what happens when one works with such developers, for
OSS projects.  I don't feel the same with for profit companies who ask one
to be a beta tester, but offer nothing in return (like a free upgrade of
version of the software), they often just take from the community and give
nothing back, except piggybacking on any promotion or media.  The OSS
community is quite different in this respect, and I always enjoy working
with the various communities I use OSS in.

Geoff

Received on Saturday, 19 June 2004 07:04:07 UTC