On 2003-12-07 18:28:54 +0000 Ben Francis ben@franci5.fsnet.co.uk wrote:
[...] Where's the incentive for programmers to write programs they don't need but other people do - within the Open Source development model.
Money. Fame. Charity.
I don't see the need to type out all the code for a language which translates into visual form quite literally.
It isn't a 1-1 mapping, which is the problem with the pseudo-WYSIWYG tools. People forget it's not 1-1 and do swanky visual effects which work for them and fail for others. I think there are two major improvements that could be made to the current crop of tools:
1. multiviews: different basic CSS default settings, so you can see how the page looks for different readers. Possibly try to emulate the defaults of popular browers and systems with limited CSS support.
2. refactor: spot common redundant markup and eliminate it. At a simple level, remove "<b></b>" strings that are common in word-processor-produced code. At a more complex level, do what you said, more like tidy on speed.
I'd like someone to extend qemacs to allow xhtml tag input in its graphical editing mode. At the moment, you need both code and display modes (html-mode and xml-mode). It's not bad. I've thrown a screenshot onto gopher://g.towers.org.uk/g/ss.png (9k) (or if you must http://g.towers.org.uk:70/ss.png )