[10289] in www-talk@info.cern.ch
Re: HTML questions ?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (jna)
Tue Sep 10 02:55:52 1996
Date: Tue, 10 Sep 1996 02:50:21 +0500 (GMT+0500)
From: jna <jna@retina.net>
To: Murray Maloney <murray@sq.com>
Cc: Eugene Venter <VENTERE@telkom.co.za>, www-talk@www0.cern.ch
In-Reply-To: <2.2.32.19960910050115.0069b220@sq.com>
Resent-From: www-talk@w3.org
On Tue, 10 Sep 1996, Murray Maloney wrote:
> At 03:55 AM 09-09-96 +0500, jna wrote:
> >On Mon, 9 Sep 1996, Eugene Venter wrote:
> >> I'm currently using Hotdog v2.53 as my HTML editor and the MAILTO
> >> function is limited here.
> >Ergh, you should go and read the HTML spec instead of trying to code with
> >a silly gui-based html builder. Use a text editor, _learn_ the spec, and
> >apply it. You will be limited if you allow all of your knowledge of html
> >to come second-hand from the people that wrote the editor.
(Okay, so maybe this was a teensy bit unfair, but...)
> That's not quite fair. SoftQuad has participated in the
> development of the HTML spec since 1993. Our product,
> HoTMetaL PRO includes the most up-to-date HTML implementation
[... various product information deleted ...]
I can completely understand the fact that you wish to promote your
product as being fully compliant, and that you are standing behind your
product in every way (including working with the appropriate groups to
make sure that you support all of the variants of html) , but there is
something to be said for learning the specs yourself. I'm not attacking
your product in particular, but I'm trying to make a stand here and say
that people should research the specs and learn what they're dealing with
before they begin to code. Most people nowadays pick up an 'HTML for
dummies book with free html editor inside' and just start churning out
broken HTML.
Maybe it's that noone wants to learn anymore, and people want to just use
tools to generate things... It's a common argument in the GUI and non-GUI
crowds, non-GUI users insist that the GUI users don't want to learn, and
the GUI users insist that the 'computer is a tool, and just should work
like one'. Yet another religious argument that is completely out of the
scope of this list.
Let us give your product the benefit of the doubt and say that every
single tag known to man, made up by netscape, or developed 2.5 days ago
by yet another company fighting for absolute control of the standard
exists in the editor. Now, for the editor to be effective, it has to give
lots and lots of warnings and information about the particular grammar of
the language. Most do not. Most just allow you to highlight something,
and say "Oh, let's make this a Heading #1" and it auto-inserts the tags
with no intelligence or attention to grammar, so it's technically
possible to 'pile up' commands so a line such as:
<H1> This is a heading with <I>italic</I> text </H1>
is possible. Although, the spec says it's completely wrong to make a
header in this manner, people do it, and Netscape/MSIE supports the
displaying of the (originally) invalid html.
How are users supposed to know how certain things are rendered in
differening environments if they only rely on the tags that are given to
them in the editors? They have to go out and test their documents under
each system, like most of us do, but the majority of people producing
HTML just outright assume that their audience is going to be 100%
netscape, or 100% MSIE and code for it, leaving thousands of people out
in the cold, and information inaccessible to users that are using textual
browsers, or older browsers like Mosaic or AOL
We write 95% of our HTML using emacs, and only switch to GUI based tools
when we need to convert large-scale documents, then passing the documents
from both of these sources into weblint-like verification tools that were
produced by the W3 consortium. We also try very hard to code for all
browsers, and not to be inconsiderate of the thousands of users out there
who still don't have the 16 megs of ram and disk space or T1 to use
netscape or graphically intensive pages.
Maybe all I'm seeking is a bit of intelligence in a void. *shrug*
--john
