Re: HTML should not be a file format, but an output format

On Sun, 23 Mar 1997 BruceLeban@akimbo.com wrote:

> This discussion seems to have degenerated. I'm not going to respond to 
> the attacks on why this group of experts dislikes Globetrotter. 
> Globetrotter isn't designed for programmers. Here's the point: let's tell 
> an average user that it's easy to break single doc into multiple pages. 
> All you have to do is:
> 
> >From: Paul Prescod <papresco@calum.csclub.uwaterloo.ca>
> > [deletia]
> 
> This is going to blow them away. And of course it won't work if they type 
> it in exactly as above because the line breaks screw things up. Writing 
> should not require programming.

Well, if Globetrotter did that *for* them, then it would be a great product.
I am one of those people that do HTML by hand, but don't have the time or
expertise to do SGML by hand, but would greatly appreciate a free - since I
can't afford most proffessional commercial SGML tools - program that does
this FOR me.

Then again, most of the web pages I have designed are not well described by
SGML documents. At least one is described by an SQL database (another
beautiful format that is ASCII based and almost universally accepted). And I
used WebSQL to make this into web pages. I might have preffered something
else, but there was nothing there.

You see, I'm a high school student. I may have an active interest in
computers and I'll be working towards a CS degree starting next year, but
I don't have the technical knowledge to use SGML or SQL or C or whatever to
produce HTML. I can write HTML - that's trivial. And I can create things in
SQL or SGML given the right tools. But if I want to make these available on
the Web, I have to make my OWN tools for converting them to that, which on
most occasions is more work than I'm willing to put into the project.

I'm not a solitary case. Most people who write web pages have their
information in some proprietary or generic format, which they can't read or
write, but have created by using user-friendly tools. These people simply
want to put these documents ON THE WEB. There's no easy way to do this. And
nobody's trying to come up with one.

--
Stephanos "Pippis" Piperoglou - http://users.hol.gr/~spip/index.html
I've never finished anything I began, but this time I'm

Received on Sunday, 23 March 1997 15:15:54 UTC