Anthony Anson tony.anson@zetnet.co.uk wrote:
The message 39c00930403b82b560d00694038d24da@bouncing.localnet from MJ Ray mjr@dsl.pipex.com contains these words:
/snippetry/
When I go to heat my tea up in the microwave [...] I just open the door, press "micro power", press "10s" three times and press "go".
...and that interface does something similar, but even more complex with incrementing counters, interacting event loops and so on. You don't really try to do mods quite as complicated to your microwave as you do your PC. If you ever wanted to, you'd find it
/more snippetry/
And when I heat something in the microwave I turn the little knob to the setting I want, then turn the timer to the number of minutes I want it to heat.
I like simplicity.
<mutter class="completelyBaffled"> How have we ended up with a comparison to microwaves for a HTML editor? A microwave has only one real job, throwing microwaves at things... a graphical HTML editor needs to cope with idiots, specifications, more idiots, and yet needs a simple interface... sounds like moon on a stick wanting to me. If you're designing a multipage site, then, still, by far the easiest way is to design a template that the site will fit in then use one of the (hundreds) of applications that can merge the data with the template, and hey presto, much easiness, easy editing, easy everything... So, maybe, if the user had a set of predefined templates in this GUI editor, it could be made easier.
If you want something with all the available power of css and html, then you're *NEVER* going to get a GUI editor to play nice and generate clean code. The closest this far is Amaya, which appears to be getting better over time :)
HTML + CSS provides a more powerful set of instructions than you're average word processor... hell, using some of the presentation style stylesheets, you've basically got a typesetting language. It's just not ever going to be able to be bent to a 'simple' editor.
Anyways - if you *REALLY* think there's a gap in the OSS world, that needs filling, why not suggest a project, set up a group somewhere to discuss it, start coding something that will fit the gap. Although, as has already been said, for the people that were previously mentioned, they need nothing more than Moz composer or OpenOffice.org's HTML editor.
Good lord, that was a long muttering session.
</mutter>
And now, food, then erm, yes, pubs.
Brett.