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

Geoff,

> 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.

You can already do this in Dreamweaver/Composer to some extent: not perfect,
but if you start off with an accessible template and the right accessibility
settings, you can do quite a lot to stop the end user messing up. (E.g.
prevent him/her adding font tags, using <em> instead of <i>, only allowing
certain style rules to be selected, and protecting certain parts of the body
and header.) It has been my experience that non-expert end users can use the
Composer editor much as they would a WP - together with all the freedom to
ignore document structure within your hypothetical <div id="content"> that
this implies, of course.

Mike: re structured editors:

Many years ago I was involved with documentation of Grif, a structured
editor to produce valid SGML documents. Implementing the DTDs for the
various doctypes, so that only the right elements could be inserted in the
right place, seemed to be the really big problem: actually editing the
documents in WYSIWYG mode didn't seem to be too onerous: but this was for
documents with closely defined content rather than unformed waffle (i.e. a
typical web page). 

HoTMetaL Pro was my favoured HTML editor back in the days of HTML1/2: that
too enforced the DTD although it didn't stop you using presentational
elements. I found it a snap to use, but suspect anyone not understanding the
markup would struggle.

Lois Wakeman

--------------------------------
http://lois.co.uk
http://siteusability.com
http://communicationarts.co.uk

Received on Monday, 21 June 2004 03:22:25 UTC