Mike Orr <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> On Mon, Jun 04, 2001 at 09:54:52AM -0700, Tavis Rudd wrote:
> > To be honest this was never high on my list as I never
> > use WYSIWYG tools that muck with your sourcecode. I'm
> > like you and use Emacs for everything.
> > However, many use nothing but WYSIWYG tools and it's
> > a worthy goal to give them something usable.
>
> As long as those of us who use text editors don't suffer because of
> it; i.e., the WYSIWYG features must be optional and not mandatory.
I really think they *must* be mandatory, but hopefully we can find
something that is useful for everyone. I think they have to be
mandatory because otherwise it is hard for WYSIWYG and text users to
interact -- and I think that is one of the essential aspects of a good
template language. This is why I think newlines can't be relied upon
-- but it's not like newline is a magical character that has
tremendous benefits over all other characters.
Somewhere I think the Right Syntax exists. I'm merely encouraging us
not to stop without finding it.
> One of the things I *don't* like about Zope Presentation Templates
> is that they substitite a nice, easy-to-type:
> <dtml-var foo>
> with a huge monster tag that repeats the content twice, merely for
> the convenience of visual tools which I never use anyway.
I agree that *always* having sample content is redundant and often
confusing. $username is easier to read and understand than (in an
imaginary ZPT-like syntax) <span replace="username">jondoe</span>,
especially if someone changes the attribute without changing the
sample contents. The sample contents are a (useful) comment area, but
comments can easily get out of hand and obscure the actual workings.
That said, I very much prefer
<img src="sampleface.gif" replaceattribute="src=faceimage"> because
not only does it work with WYSIWYG editors, there's a lot of other
tools that work better this way (page-size-checkers and
height-width-inserters, for instance). Of course, if all face images
aren't exactly the same dimensions, it would be better to just have
<img src="$faceimage">.
> (Kind of like the XML tradeoff we've discussed on and off: you can
> make your files XML-correct so you can use XML tools on them, but
> what XML tools are there that you're going to use??)
But, unlike XMl, there really *are* lots of WYSIWYG editors. And they
have their problems, but they actually have real benefits as well.
And even XML isn't *all* bad. The composition tools probably will
exist eventually -- basically, a decent editor that uses CSS to
enhance the structure, and a highly configurable interface that
exposes concrete controls for the specific DTD you are working with.
Maybe people are trying to be too general with these tools, and not
realizing that composing XML can never be done in both a general and
accessible fashion.
PS is lists.sourceforge.net messed up in some fashion?
Ian
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