On 2003-12-07 17:42:18 +0000 Dan Hatton dan.hatton@btinternet.com wrote:
I personally either code my HTML by hand in emacs, or code LaTeX by hand in emacs, then use LaTeX2HTML.
LaTeX2HTML is a partial reimplementation of LaTeX in perl, I think. Any reason not to use tex4ht?
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.)
Stop just there. That's the argument in a nut shell. The reader should be able to override nearly all display choices. The browser platform features also influence the presentation. They may even be using audio presentation instead of video. Once you get a tool that encourages you to draw little green boxes on the screen in the belief that all readers will see little green boxes, you get some very strange reader experiences. Instructions like "choose from the links in the little green box" doesn't mean much. You get similar (but less entertaining) problems from JavaScript-only navigation and other things encouraged by certain "web design" software. Finally, some of them produce invalid code which further damages the presentation.
No, it's really not WYSIWYG out there.
Mozilla Composer gets some nice comments because it's a GUI markup tool rather than a web design program and produces almost-sane code. The developers also seem willing to fix problems as they find them. Amaya produces even better code, but users seem not to like the interface.