[WSG] Adobe Forum comment on CSS in visual editors

[Marilyn Langfeld]

I was looking through the Adobe GoLive forum and came across this comment, which I thought would be of interest. I'm not trying to provoke a response here, but I think it's important to hear the perspective of an employee at Adobe who often helps people with CSS questions on their forum. And since most beginning web designers (accent on designers) probably try Dreamweaver or GoLive first, when learning web design.

http://tinyurl.com/4jo25
free registration required, so I'm also quoting the post.

Here's the comment, which is a little off topic of the thread, in answer to an earlier comment by Ron which is quoted:



JohnDonaldson - 4:42pm Nov 22, 04 PST (#18 of 21) Edited: 22-Nov-2004 at 04:43pm

Ron,

it is clear to me that the individuals who designed this application were/are not hard core CSS scripters.


Sorry, but there is a counter-argument here. It is clear to me that the people who designed the CSS standard were entirely unconcerned about how it might ever be handled by visual editors, since none of them actually used visual editors, nor did they even consider that they might be or should be important. The only model which interested them was, prepare markup in a text editor, write CSS rules in a text editor, check result in browser. So, what's so wrong with visual editors?

Just think for a moment about a model of markup structure separated from format, and the formatting model requires that the entire set of CSS rules must be re-read every single time that *anything* is edited in a page to verify if the context, specificity, and cascade positions remain the same or have changed. It doesn't matter a stuff if you hand-code markup and CSS; it matters quite a lot if you are trying to present something in a visual editor.

Actually, I think given the way the standards are written and the way they work, both GoLive and Dreamweaver do a good job.

There are certainly tools in both which try to put back together, or hide, the separation which lies at the heart of the structural markup/CSS formatting model. If you actually understand the way they are designed to separate, on the other hand, GoLive provides pretty good tools for creating your CSS.

John



Best regards,

Marilyn Langfeld
http://www.langfeldesigns.com
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