On 2003-12-04 09:44:44 +0000 Graham Trott gt@pobox.com wrote:
graphical approach to anything, whether it does the job better or not. Once persuaded of the benefits of manual mark-up they're surely capable, but if they're only doing lightweight HTML the problem is in making that first step.
The concepts aren't really hugely different from the graphical approach. I think there's a lot of mileage to be had from the three editors which do the graphical/code switchable view quite well: Mozilla Composer, Amaya and QEmacs. (Actually, I'd like QEmacs to be able to do more editing in graphical mode, but have no time to write it.) Even editors like Bluefish and Emacs-with-W3 which use different windows/frames for the code and render windows can be very useful.
The basic problem is still that HTML (properly xhtml) is not really capable of being WYSIWYG. Once you start throwing floating and fixed blocks around, you do need to have some idea of flowing and how layout works. Get the page layout right, or it will break for some people. Even I sometimes break things ;-) (especially on "free" sites where I experiment a little ;-) ). I will generally try to put it right.
OK, you can say that you just don't care about the people who can't see it, but why publish xhtml then? Why not upload files for specific applications? Clearly, there was some ambition for it to be widely readable when you started the idea... and it's not really hard to do. Sadly, some tools do make it harder than it should be. Sometimes, the ambition of accessibility gets sacrificed for the editor to get a pretty interface. Needs of the one versus needs of the many and all that. The pretty interface often means that people only start to learn page layout when they want to do something complicated, often under pressure. That's not a good place to start.
Looking at the other tools mentioned, it seems that some GUI web design tools are worse than them. An automatic car has some gear selection options, dishwashers can be jumped around their programmes manually and AV kit with remotes usually have on-board interfaces too. The reality is that the "easier" interfaces don't meet all needs, so the other ones are still mostly present. What's the lesson here? All web design toolkits should work well with code editors, perhaps? I don't think spewing reams of unnecessary JavaScript, <table> and <font> tags into invalid code meets that. Maybe there are some good GUI advanced design tools which do live nicely with it.
While mentioning these, GIMP has a nice Plugin -> Web -> Image map tool. Doesn't produce valid xhtml yet, but tidy kicks it into shape. There's also Guillotine in there. Just thought you'd like to know, in case they're not in the toolkits of any web developers yet.
Other related points: Mozilla Firebird here and not crashed in a long time; I think tabs should be a window manager feature, not in every application, but I'm not backing that up with code yet.