On Fri, 04 Apr 2008 12:42:21 -0500
Robert Derman wrote:

> Johnny Rosenberg wrote:

[snip type="mandatory"]

> What is often forgotten is that none of us has the RIGHT to decide
> what other people SHOULD WANT. 

Probably the best example in the FOSS world is Seamonkey. mozilla.org
decided that Netscape, and therefore Mozilla, was bloated software. It
therefore decided to break it up into seperate components. Firefox and
Thunderbird are nice and much faster loading. But Seamonkey was quickly
cobbled together for those that still desired a do-all internet app.

> Just because we wouldn't want something does not mean that others
> shouldn't want it. De gustabus non disputandum (Latin) (not sure how
> it is spelled, and no time to look it up, but it is definitely the
> right phrase here) 

You do no service to the opportunity presented and show yourself as lazy
in the process. Misspelled, missworded and not explained latin is like a
supermarket plastic bag caught on your fence. It totally missed the
benefit and opportunity - why even bother.
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Latin_proverbs#D

> I would like to be able to answer emails like this using Writer rather
> than Thunderbird simply because I am so used to Writer that I am much
> more comfortable writing with it than any other text editing program. 

Hmm, Microsoft have just reverted with Office 2007 to using Words HTML
Engine for writing emails in Outlook. What a bollocks that has made of
it. The tinyurl links are copies of the originals above which will work
when the original wordwraps.
http://www.campaignmonitor.com/blog/archives/2007/01/microsoft_takes_email_design_b.html
http://tinyurl.com/ylo74r
http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2007/01/10/microsoft-breaks-html-email-rendering-in-outlook/
http://tinyurl.com/y5fxq5

> The same applies to writing HTML for my web page, I use Nvu, but I
> don't much like it because it doesn't have an undo button.  Simple
> errors that mess up formatting take a lot of time and keystrokes to
> correct, rather than just clicking on undo. 

Most of us when we first start writing for the web fall into the trap of
the Print Designer. We try to make the web page look "just so". 

First up, the web is not a printed page. You should cater for monitors
that range from 800X600 to 1920X1080. You should cater for various
browsers, Firefox 2 & 3, IE 6, 7 & 8, Safari, Opera, Konqueror and
perhaps even Lynx. You should cater for Jaws. If you do not then you are
making no allowance for taste "De gustibus non est disputandum" ("In
matters of taste there is no dispute" commonly rendered as "There's no
accounting for taste".) <<< 1 minute copy and paste exercise.

No WYSIWYG tool does all of this for you. CSS is almost a must to
achieve "the semantic web" and CSS can produce some beautiful web pages:
http://www.csszengarden.com/
You can produce usefull web pages without CSS and without HTML tables
but it looks boring: 
http://linux.oneandoneis2.org/LNW.htm
Actually the above was either done in Word or Frontpage with some
unnecesary stuff stripped out.

NVU (a discontinued project) was based on Netscape Composer (a
discontinued project) and uses styles, badly at best, to force looks
where it fits in with the rest of the tool. IOW you will outgrow it if
you want to keep growing in your web pages. Most serious web developers
even outgrow dreamweaver.

Word and Writer can both produce web pages. It doesn't mean they should!
If you want your own site, nowadays WordPress, MySpace(Yuk!), Joomla,
and Drupal are better (in least to most complex order). If you want a
web GUI interface, keep your eye on this one:
http://demo.wymeditor.org/demo.html
It looks boring but when you see the results dressed in css it can be
great as well as semantically compliant.

> If some of these other applications were better, I might not feel this
> way, but they aren't better!  For instance I end up using all caps for
> emphasis, simply because whenever I use the bold in Thunderbird, it
> never makes it through to this mail list, it just comes out as *
> bold*, which just doesn't have the same impact. 

This is a text only mailing list. No bold, italics, fancy fonts or
pretty pictures allowed. Some email clients will *turn this* back into
bold text.

-- 
Michael

All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall
be well

 - Julian of Norwich 1342 - 1416

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