Re: Visual Markup (should HTML die?)

> If you haven't noticed, many people write documents in word processors
> like Microsoft Word which don't do either of these things. And this is

That's only partly true, in that style sheet information becomes fixed 
into a document, but you can still get he benefit for new documents.

The real problem, as you say, is that people don't use the style
capabilities that exist in Word, in the same way that they tab round
line ends, fill with empty paragraphs for page breaks (better is a
hard page break, even better is intelligent use of keep together and
keep with next attributes) and double paragraph for paragraph spacing.
This is why WYSIWYG is so easy to sell; most people do not understand
the structure of what they are writing.

If anything the problem is getting worse, as teachers in primary schools
are taught from books that describe bad methods, so they don't teach
their pupils proper structure, even though they might well do so in 
terms of pen and ink writing.  They actually miss an opportunity to
help teach principles of good non-web writing in their haste to check off
their "write a simple web page" curriculum item.

Received on Monday, 24 February 2003 02:17:48 UTC