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List:       kde-devel
Subject:    Re: Q: html editor
From:       Talin <Talin () ACM ! org>
Date:       2000-04-28 6:33:19
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What you say is true, but is missing the point.

For "professional" pages that are part of a production web site, one
with lots of dynamic content, it makes no sense to use a WYSIWYG editor.

However, not all web publishing is of this kind. In particular, things
like technical papers, daily diaries, opinion essays, and other
primarily textual content which have no active elements at all benefit
greatly from a WYSIWYG approach. It's a lot of work to compose in raw
HTML, and the tags are really distracting when you are trying to
concentrate on composing new text. Frankly, I find it almost impossible
to write essays in a non-WYSIWYG editor.

At work, I use FrontPage (yes, I admit it) for maintaining the company
intranet. All of our technical documentation, corporate directories, and
other documents are composed with this. Of course, the HTML it produces
is crap, but who cares? This is not for public consumption, and the
pages _look_ just fine. Simple, but professional. It does the job, and
even the marketing people can use it without any special training.

Of course, we would _never_ use FrontPage for our _public_ site. That
has to be hand-optimized for the fastest possible download speed,
carefully tweaked to work with about a dozen different browsers, and has
lots of images, a complex table structure, and tons of JSP tags.

So there is a place for both approaches, and I would encourage you to be
open to alternatives. In particular, if there was a decent WYSIWYG
editor in the open source world, I would use it.

Alexei Dets wrote:
> 
> Hi!
> Thomas wrote:
> >
> > > I just want to say that I'm going to porting webmaker for KDE2 soon.
> > > Last week I've downloaded the KDE2 CVS, compiled and was _very_ pleased.
> > > It is great!
> >
> > Cool, I'll get the webmaker sometime next week and take a look at it.
> > I really want an open source dreamweaver-like application on linux. So if
> > you like the concept of dreamweaver I'd like webmaker to become more like that.
> > The main difference is that the 'preview' screen is the editor screen; Wysiwyg.
> 
> Sorry, but I must disappoint you - WebMaker is not a WYSIWYG editor and
> I don't want it to become such one. The reason is very simple - HTML and
> WYSIWYG are two very, very different concepts, in general they are
> incompatible. So, all this "WYSIWYG editors" are only fictions, they
> fool people - they can start to believe that their pages will look in
> browser the same way as in editor. Generally such pages look very bad
> and unprofessional. And if you understand it and try to improve look in
> such editor it will take at least twice time that will be required in
> non-WYSIWYG HTML editor. And they are not suitable for professional web
> development - 95% of modern internet sites are not static HTML pages,
> but dynamic pages, generated from databases or other data sources using
> templates in HTML + PHP + SSI + embeded Perl etc. "WYSIWYG" editor can't
> handle this at all.
> 
> I'm professional web developer. I don't need such crap. I think that it
> is useless and even more, harmfull. I will not work on this. Let people
> that believe that development of full internet site is possible without
> HTML knowledge and in 5 minutes work on such "WYSIWYG" editor. It will
> be interesting thing - in general they also believe that good program
> can be created without knowledge of programming ;-)))
> 
> Of course, I'll try to add some things that can be called pseudo-WYSIWYG
> - table generator ala FrontPage, frame generator, CSS editor and so on -
> this are options, extensions that can simplify life and don't add
> problems of "WYSIWYG" editors.
> 
>         WBW, Alexei

-- 
Talin (Talin@ACM.org)       "I am life's flame. Respect my name.
www.sylvantech.com/~talin    My fire is red, my heart is gold.
www.hackertourist.com/talin  Thy dreams can be...believe in me,
                             If you will let my wings unfold..."
                               -- Heather Alexander

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