On 15 Jan 2005 at 16:59, Andrew Stiller wrote: > David Bailey: > > >HTML isn't hard to figure out, > > I know it isn't, and in fact I've worked directly in HTML in the past. > Boy is it time-consuming! > > The whole point of having a WYSIWYG GUI is not to have to bother with > such things, right? I mean, aren't C++ and Basic pretty easy too? And > what could be easier than sequences of ones and zeroes?
I don't know about the Mac side of things, but I've never seen a WYSIWYG HTML editor that produces good HTML. It's really a false promise, anyway, as you can't really know what you're going to get from a particular page of HTML, as all the different rendering engines have subtle and not-so-subtle differences in the way they render HTML (including rendering errors in some engines, especially the various versions of IE for Windows, which has 3 major versions of the rendering engine, each with significant quirks and rendering errors). And I also think what you really need is an editor that makes it easy to enter the HTML, one that puts in both ends of closed tags, one that understands tables (and perhaps has simplified UIs for setting up and formatting your tables), one that is integrated with a CSS editor (CSS is vastly preferable to tables for formatting, though the bad implementation of CSS in the various versions of IE means that you can't really utilize CSS to its full extent without causing problems for large numbers of users). In short, because of all of these problems, SIMPLE IS BETTER. WYWIWYG tends to promote FANCY, and that, in my opinion, tends to narrow the number of users who'll get the intended experience from your web page. FWIW, I don know that lots of professionals use DreamWeaver and it is apparently as good as it gets in terms of producing good HTML. I don't believe it's fully WYSYWIG, though I think it makes it easy to figure out how your HTML is going to render. -- David W. Fenton http://www.bway.net/~dfenton David Fenton Associates http://www.bway.net/~dfassoc _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [email protected] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
