Posted by Alan J. Flavell on 11/12/05 15:18

On Fri, 11 Nov 2005, JDS wrote:

> Even OpenOffice produces beter HTML code, is free, and is
> basically WYSIWYG.

The idea of HTML is that "What You Get" is structural markup, not some
visual presentation. So, if What You are Seeing Is structural markup,
I suppose you could *truly* say that What You See Is What You Get.
However, this is absolutely *not* what most people understand the term
WYSIWYG to mean.

With HTML, the key thing to understand is that what the author sees is
NOT what each reader gets. All attempts to bypass that have proven,
not surprisingly, to produce sub-standard results.

What I think people have in mind when they wibble about "WYSIWYG web
editor" is something which IMHO is more accurately known as a visual
previewing editor. But the visual preview is only a *part* of
designing good web pages.

MS Word incorporates some very useful ideas - and in fact was doing so
before the web finally woke up to the same principles. I'm thinking
primarily about using named styles instead of direct formatting, and
linking them to a style "template", analogous to a CSS stylesheet.
But these features seem to be widely disregarded by beginners to the
use of MS Word, and are not properly taught from the start. If I had
my way, I'd rip the direct styling buttons out of the Word user
interface, and hide them away in some obscure menu intended for
advanced users, leaving the beginners to select from the available
styles in one of the prepared style templates offered to them.

Sure, the HTML generated by Word's own HTML generator is deplorable
(and the same goes for any of the other MS applications that I've ever
seen which purport to generate HTML); even after applying the "filter"
in Word 2003 it is still crap (the most evident being the explicit and
apparently non-optional in-line use of CSS pt font sizing). And the
occasional dirty-tricks generation of "Symbol" font references,
instead of converting them into the proper Unicode references, is
another annoyance. But that's a different part of the story.

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