The message 200312041326.28812.gt@pobox.com from Graham Trott gt@pobox.com contains these words:
As has been said earlier, WYSIWYG is NWYSIWYG: quite the reverse, and tends to bork anything except in the browser it was intended to be viewed in. (No prizes awarded for correct identification of respective elements.)
Fine for professionals, which seems to cover many of the people in this group.
I'm not a professional.
But if Joe is an ordinary guy at home wanting to put up a family website on FreeServe, why on earth would he care if the result runs on Lynx or whatever?
And ditto, but not on Freeserve.
He knows that 99% of viewers will be running IE and won't give a toss for the rest. He doesn't do it for the love of it; he has no concept of what makes tidy HTML but wants results NOW and preferably at little or no cost.
There I must disagree: many people run two or more browsers, and 1% is IMO an underestimate by a very large factor. Don't forget, that there are Mac, RISC, Commodore etc users out there as well as Windows-based ones, and of the Windows users, many have more than one browser. I have Firebird, Opera and Netscape on my Windows box, and only keep IE because it's cunningly built into the system.
I test my pages in Mozilla, Opera and Netscape, and I don't give a flying **** if they display in IE.
I do the occasional set of web pages, mainly simple stuff. I prefer RAD tools for getting me started but I'm quite happy to tweak it manually from there on in. I use Symantec's Visual Page, now long abandoned by its maker. Produces clean HTML that I've seen no browser object to and has the usual manual editing option. I'd like the same kind of thing on Linux but haven't seen it yet.
Mozilla.
Like Joe, I have better things to do than type all those tags if I can get a program to do it for me, and if the results are occasionally not what I expected, that's life.
Well, you take second-best. That's your loss.
P.S. My car is an automatic, I own a dishwasher and my TV/Video/CD all have remote controls.
My car is manual, wind-up/down windows and presently not on the road. I haven't got room for a dishwasher at home, indeed, until I can find a single-tub I haven't got a washing-machine at all, and I haven't had a haunted fishtank since the early 'seventies. My CD player does have a remote, but I haven't a clue where it is.
This isn't because I'm a Luddite: it's because: I don't like driving an automatic and I wouldn't be able to afford to get it fixed if the transmission went wrong. Got the T-shirt. Living alone, I haven't enough dishes etc to make a dishwasher practical, even if I had somewhere to put it. If I had somewhere to put a larger washing machine I'd get one, meanwhile it's doing it how I remember my mother doing the washing in the 'forties. ('Cept I haven't got a copper.) TV. Won't pay the licence fee for what's on offer: besides, I just don't have the time.
The CD player is used only infrequently: lack of time again, and I've played all my CDs many times over. And before you say it - no, I haven't been spending lots of time writing HTML - a bit of Visual Basic maybe - I have some RL to attend to as well.