Posted by Curtis on 12/05/05 02:40

Alan J. Flavell <flavell@physics.gla.ac.uk> wrote in message
news:Pine.WNT.4.64.0512041123180.1576@ZORIN...
>
> On Sun, 4 Dec 2005, Curtis wrote:
>
> > In a few years, when client-side WYSIWYG editors
actually
> > /work/ worth beans,
>
> "What You See Is Not What Others Get". This is the design
feature of
> the web. Trying to factor that out is, I might say, the
greatest
> single cause of badly-conceived web pages. What You See
Is Just One
> Possible Rendering. There is - and there can not be -
such a thing as
> WYSIWYG web page design, unless and until you take away
the very thing
> for which the web was invented - namely, access to the
same content
> from a wide range of different browsing situations.
>

I'm of two minds on this subject, Alan. While this is a bit
of a digression from my attempt to understand how to best
use CSS to extend Marx, I don't mind commenting.

People who produce online content are torn between the
desire to produce visually attractive content *from the
perspective of the /producer/* and the desire to make that
content viewable in ways that appeal to the preferences of
the /viewer./

I think both perspectives are valid. I'd like to present a
site precisely as *I* think it might be best represented,
but give viewers who see the world through different eyes
the option to choose. With style sheets and user selectable
themes, both can be accomplished.

But I concur that the WYSIWYG is, for the web, a relative
term at best. It is, however, quite valid to use "WYSIWYG"
Javascript-based editors to produce bold, italic,
font-choice, color, indenting, relative font sizes, etc.,
for content that will have a certain layout; however fluid
browsers might make the actual appearance--bold is still
bold, and indented is still indented.

I have nothing in principle against the JS "WYSIWYG"
editors. They're just too slow, take too long to download on
slow connections, and commonly break in browsers as late as
IE 5.X. When these problems disappear, or when browsers
build in this functionality in native code as opposed to a
pig-slow scripting language, I expect that BBCode and Marx
will not be of as much use.

Of course, there is the database size issue. If Wikipedia.
for example, stored its articles in HTML, its already
enormous database would be even more gargantuan. But it uses
a markup not unlike our Marx markup, which greatly reduces
overhead.

Writing about Marx markup on the WTT website, Nathan Hawking
gives the example of a table in HTML vs. Marx. To place a
single character in a cell in HTML requires *twenty some*
characters in HTML, as opposed to *two* in Marx.

Curtis

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