RE:Re: More thoughts

In article of 11:16 PM 10/27/94, mag@ncsa.uiuc.edu (Tom Magliery) writes:
>I'm not disagreeing about the usefulness of a product that saves the
> user
>from entering tags the hard way, but at some level, the user is going to
>have to be able to indicate that some certain groups of characters in
> the
>document are, for example, a "level 1 header", or a "paragraph", and so
> on.
>So much the better if they've got WYSIWYG to boot.
I think Microsoft Word is a great example of such a scheme.

>But at the same time, from your point of view as creator of the product,
>it's important to adhere to the principle of "accept liberally, generate
>conservatively".  What you're doing is generating HTML.  While the user
> is
>happily pecking away at his document, you need to make sure that the
> HTML
>that you're quietly representing it with in the background is always
> valid.
>(Or if it temporarily isn't, somehow let the user know that something's
>wrong with what they're attempting to do.)
Well if we define that "unrecognized tags' are ignored, I think we can 
generate HTML to do nifty stuff, that might get ignore, but oh well. 
Recently I browsed some WWW pages using NCSA Mosaic version 1.x, and guess 
what? No forms. But no crash, no great tragedy.

Alex Hopmann
ResNova Software, Inc.

Received on Monday, 31 October 1994 03:42:01 UTC