Re: Cleaning House

Philip Taylor (Webmaster) wrote:
> Jeff Cutsinger wrote:
>> Patrick H. Lauke wrote:
>>> suggest generic approaches such as an appropriately styled <span>.
>>
>>
>> Forcing the use of a styled span is bad because styles are dangerous.
>> It'd be akin to forcing someone to use Javascript to the same end. No,
>> if a user typing into a WYSIWYG editor hits the "b" button, it should
>> output a <b> tag.
> 
> Why do you assume that a well-designed WYSIWYG editor would
> have a "b" button (or any similar button, for that matter) ?
> Just because the editor is WYSIWYG doesn't mean that it
> has to treat its users as idiots : present them with
> logical, extensible, semantic markup options, shew them how
> easy it is to create a new element (say, keyword), shew
> them how easy it is to render all keyword elements in bold black,
> shew them how easy it is to change the rendition to boxed red, and
> they will wonder why editing has never been so simple and so powerful.
> 
> Philip Taylor
> 

Show me an example of a popular WYSIWYG editor that does this.

a) Using a presentational paradigm isn't treating users as idiots. To
users, a computer is a tool. They don't care about "semantics v.
presentational markup", they care about getting that timeliness report
done yesterday and looking great for their boss. I'm thinking of some
(very smart but computer illiterate) people at my office who have a hard
enough time getting the conceptually simpler presentational paradigm down.

b) Your example works fine until the semantic markup gets embedded into
a document with a different stylesheet that is out of their control.

c) Regardless of your point, there are lots of WYSIWYG editors out there
that have "b" buttons. Whether this is right or not is moot: they exist
and will continue to exist for a long time, and markup should be able to
handle this.