Re: Cleaning House

David Woolley wrote:
> 
> Philip & Le Khanh wrote:
> 
>> Microsoft Word is a text editor. We are discussing an HTML editor,
>> which is a totally different kettle of fish, as I'm sure you'd
>> agree.
> 
> Microsoft Word is a lot more than a text editor.  It has had styles, 
> allowing semantic markup, for more than 15 years.  The styles even give 
> benefits to people who use them that are not common in web browsers, 
> like automatic table of contents generation and automatic heading 
> numbering.

OK, perhaps "text editor" was a little harsh.  But it is used
almost exclusively to prepare a document for print.  Those using it
rarely if ever consider as they write how their words might
appear were the output medium to be anything other than
a sheet of paper.  HTML writers, on the other hand, (at least,
the more professional ones), mark up their text such that it
can map to /any/ medium, not just to a computer screen or
a sheet of paper.  Thus there is (I would argue) a fundamentally
different paradigm at work when one (a) uses Microsoft Word,
and (b) one uses an HTML editor.

Philip Taylor

Received on Saturday, 5 May 2007 10:14:44 UTC