- From: Daniel Glazman <daniel.glazman@disruptive-innovations.com>
- Date: Tue, 01 Apr 2008 18:15:39 +0200
- To: Neil Soiffer <Neils@dessci.com>
- Cc: Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch>, Bruce Miller <bruce.miller@nist.gov>, Sam Ruby <rubys@us.ibm.com>, Robert Miner <robertm@dessci.com>, Henri Sivonen <hsivonen@iki.fi>, David Carlisle <davidc@nag.co.uk>, public-html@w3.org, www-math@w3.org
Neil Soiffer wrote: > However, without real facts, it is hard to see how hand authoring can be > considered a priority. Our personal experiences are just not > informative of what the majority of users do. Thank you for this great message. Seriously. If you're a geek living most of your time in a geek world as most of us do, you can observe the following: - linux has a remarkable market share on the desktop - pure text editors are always the first editing tools installed - W3C's tidy is a well-known HTML sanitizer - everyone knows what's a doctype - everyone has heard of CSS - PDF authoring has no market - HTML-based email is non-existent ... Last year at a conference in Paris, I gave a talk on the History of HTML. At some point during my talk, I mentioned the fact that XHTML 2 is a dead duck because when you chop off the <head> of a duck, the <body> is still moving. Geeks laughed. A lot. Non-geeks were totally lost, looking at the rest of the crowd with scared eyes... The very very VERY vast majority of web users has never viewed the source of a web page. They are all potential web authors. I sincerely hope - and please remember that's the original dream of TBL about a browser/editor - they will all become web authors. If I take the largest blog host here in France, more than 3 million blogs, its authoring UI is strictly wysiwyg. You can be sure users of that blog platform with a minimal knowledge of HTML are below 1%. The vast majority of these non-geek users also send HTML-based email. Without any kind of HTML knowledge. They _are_ authoring HTML. Never _ever_ consider yourself as a target user for the technologies you're working on, that's the lesson. Hardcoding HTML should remain possible. HTML is what it is today because the early adopters could understand and learn the first versions of HTML in hours. Making HTML5 hardcodable is probably not a priority in its own. But making HTML5 hardcodable helps designing it simple, and that will help tutorial authors, editing tool implementors and in the end the whole community. KISS is not bad principle after all. Just my 0.02 eurocents. </Daniel> -- Co-Chair, W3C CSS WG
Received on Tuesday, 1 April 2008 16:16:17 UTC