Re: html and dreamweaver

I have used Dreamweaver (it is being adopted as a standard here)
and although it generates /reasonable/ HTML, it is in no sense W3C-
standards-aware.  For a start, there is no support for DTDs; a page as
generated by unmodified DW has no DOCTYPE directive, and although
it will carry forward a DOCTYPE directive from a modified template,
it does so with no regard to the syntactic implications of that directive.
When in- and outdenting sections of material, it can generate
/really/ bad code.  The best HTML editor I have ever used (in
the sense that "good" -> "capable of being validated without
error" is HoTMetaL PRO, but even that editor is by no means perfect :
as standard it used an internal (SoftQuad-specific) DTD which is
not accessible; like DW, it will also carry forward a W3C DOCTYPE from
a modified template, but unlike DW it also pays attention to the syntactic
implications of that DOCTYPE.  /However/, if it does not recognise the 
DOCTYPE (as was the case for some time if an HTML 4.01 DOCTYPE directive 
was used), then it reverts to its least stringent DTD (probably its
own internal SQ DTD), yet issues no warning to tell you that the
DOCTYPE is being ignored.  And whilst, in general, it prevents you
from generating bad HTML whilst typing, it appears to turn all error-
checking off when pasting in material, as a result of which a page can 
end up so badly corrupted that even its internal validator/fixed doesn't
know what to do; at this point, there is no option but to plunge into
the raw HTML and fix it by hand.  DW is good, if by "good" you mean
"can generate clever effects in a non-browser-specific way", and its
internal library of JavaScript is pretty robust; but it can generate
really bad code, and cannot be used naively if W3C-compliance of
the resulting pages is a formal requirement.

Philip Taylor, RHBNC.
--------
sir_tuba@juno.com wrote:
> 
> To begin, I must say that I have not used dreamweaver, so what I say may
> or may not apply to that program.
> 
> The main problem with using wysiwyg html-editors is that they (for the
> most part) do not correctly follow w3 standards. For example, they use an
> inordinate numper of paragraph tags and non-breaking spaces to achieve
> formatting. Also, they tend to use deprecated tags, such as <center> and
> <font>, instead of styles. If an html-editor could be developed that
> correctly followed w3 standards, then there would be no problem.
> 
> > Marcelo Perrone, at 17:28 -0300 on Wed, 6 Dec 2000, wrote:
> >
> >  What do you guys think about that? Is there any w3 issue on
> >   not-hand-coding-html?
> >
> > This is totally off the top of my head, but I would think that the W3
> > would actually recommend using a good HTML editor, as a good editor
> will
> > help the user generate valid HTML, and help the user choose the
> > appropriate elements to semanticize some data.
> >
> > --
> > Frank Tobin           http://www.uiuc.edu/~ftobin/

Received on Sunday, 10 December 2000 16:25:51 UTC