Posted by Toby A Inkster on 02/15/07 18:04

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.

You are comparing apples with oranges here. PostScript is[1] a language for
describing what pages look like. HTML is a language for describing what
pages *mean*.

People can auto-generate postscript documents from visual tools and the
generating process will accurately create a document conveying the user's
intentions.

When people auto-generate HTML documents from visual tools, the tool needs
to guess what the user really meant. Is does this text begin a new
paragraph (<p>), or is it really just two line breaks (<br><br>)? This
series of several short lines, should it be marked up as a bullet-less
list? Do these italics signify a citation (<cite>), some emphasis (<em>),
or a Latin phrase (<i lang="la">)? Is that a single-line paragraph of bold
text (<p><b>) or should it really be a third-level heading (<h3>)?

There are, as I see it, three solutions to this conundrum:

1. To hell with semantics! Forget <em>, <cite> and so on, just
use <i> all the time!
2. Write a tool that's really, really good at guessing
semantics.
3. Write a tool that doesn't have buttons and short-cut keys
for things like bold, italic, different colours and fonts
and so forth, but has buttons to insert citations, quotes,
diagrammes and so forth, has options to mark certain chunks
of text as either more or less important than the rest.

Most recent visual HTML editors use the first approach, creating
semantic-free documents. In my opinion authors using this sort of
tool have no business writing HTML at all. If all they care about is
the visual appearance of the document, they should probably switch
to publishing in Flash, which is far more suited to their ideas.

The second solution has been attempted once or twice, but tends to get
things wrong as often as it gets them right.

The third solution is a good idea, but using the current attempts at
this sort of tool tends to be no easier to use than typing the HTML
by hand anyway, rendering them rather useless.

As an aside, some people *do* write postscript by hand. And whatsmore,
this usually results in much smaller files, which load much more quickly.

____
1. PostScript is actually a fully-fledged scripting language, but it's
commonly used as a page description language and as a transmission format
for print jobs.

--
Toby A Inkster BSc (Hons) ARCS
Contact Me ~ http://tobyinkster.co.uk/contact
Geek of ~ HTML/SQL/Perl/PHP/Python*/Apache/Linux

* = I'm getting there!

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