Posted by Benjamin Niemann on 02/15/07 17:41

fgdg wrote:

> Why do we put up with web design software? Nobody makes a PDFs by
> writing Postscript in Notepad, but that is what designer's working for
> the web are expected to do. That is how far web design has come.
> Postscript is a page description language like HTML or CSS.

There's a fundamental difference between PS/PDF and HTML+CSS. PS/PDF are
exact (as far as possible) representations of a printed - and thus fixed -
document. In this context WYSIWYG makes sense - pretty much indeed.

But the HTML+CSS combo has to deal with different user-agents,
screen-/fontsizes, user stylesheets and a gazillion of other factors that
influence how a document is seen/heard/felt by a user. And this is an
advancement over printed media.
Applying WYSIWYG to web-documents just creates the *illusion* of simplicity,
moves the focus to presentational details while hiding semantics. This
reduces HTML+CSS to a bad PDF replacement.


--
Benjamin Niemann
Email: pink at odahoda dot de
WWW: http://pink.odahoda.de/

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