Krister Ekstrom wrote:
Well, i know why i would want to use a wysiwyg editor or at least a
half wysiwyg one. Today it doesn't suffice with only html. It only
produses dull static pages and people want snazzy looks, not boring
text pages.
Out of interest, how high a value do you place on defining the theme
(colors, fonts, layout) from scratch yourself, rather than reusing
themes created by others to be aesthetic to end-users, maintainable by
programmers, and robust across user agents? Premade themes is the
approach widely used for content management and blogging systems.
And if it's theme editing you really want to do, what if the functions
of theme editing and content editing were separated? So for example, in
your theme editor, you might select a page layout (e.g. header, three
column body, footer), then select preferred fonts and colors for
different components? e.g. You might make the text sans black-on-white,
with serif red table headings and headers.
Then in your content editor, you'd create your text and data tables.
And then you'd have a theme you could apply to new content as you
created it, and content you could apply new themes too.
Now I and i just speak for myself now, am a total idiot
when it comes to programming in any shape or form and that even means
css, which you have to have today in order for a page to look good. I
wouldn't know what a class, id or selector was even if they jumped up
and bit me in the face, so if there was an editor that could help me
fixing that
I guess the question is whether your problems were with the syntax or
the underlying concepts (e.g. id relates to a unique component in a
page, class relates to multiple components, selectors are a way to bind
styles to components). A tool can abstract away a syntax; it's much
harder to abstract away an underlying concept. One of the reasons
typical WYSIWYG editors produce code that is hard to maintain is because
they haven't helped the users grapple with the actual task at hand
(defining logical, reusable, consistent styles for components), instead
either confusing the content markup with stylistic information or
dumping all the stylistic information in a separate but meaningless mass.
--
Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis
