On Thu, 4 Dec 2003, MJ Ray wrote:
A true "WYSIWYG [HTML] editor" is impossible.
This seems to have met with general agreement, and a polarization into those who are willing to sacrifice (standards-compliant) HTML for WYSIWYG, and those who are willing to sacrifice WYSIWYG for standards-compliant HTML. I personally either code my HTML by hand in emacs, or code LaTeX by hand in emacs, then use LaTeX2HTML. However, I'm not sure about the "impossible," and wonder if you could explain it.. is the argument as follows?
The point of HTML is that the reader, not the author, decides how pages are formatted and presented (I don't really understand CSS, but I guess they amend this a bit.)
Once one gives an author WYSIWYG, it is impossible to resist the tempatation to extend "what you see is what you get" to "what you see is what you (perhaps unintentionally) impose on everyone else," and include formatting information in the HTML, which tends to break its standards compliance.
If so, I think resisting that temptation is merely difficult, not impossible, although this is not me volunteering code ;-). Do the favourable comments about Mozilla Composer mean that it's achieved this resistance?
On the other hand, is there demand among authors for documents on the WWW where they get full control of the formatting and presentation, in which case what we're looking for might not be WYSIWYG HTML editor, but a WYSIWYG [some other reasonably portable format] editor?