RE: Web Development Software

Chuck wrote:
>>I disagree.  One of the most important aspects of HTML is that it
>>describes the structure of a document, and not the actual appearance of a
>>document.  By using a WYSIWYG tool, you may get
>>too hung up on how the document looks, which almost always differs when
>>the document is viewed in different browsers.  Or even on the same
browser
>>on different systems.
>
>HTML describes both. Do the bold and italics tags describe the structure
of
>an HTML document? Does using tables to generate white space (and increase
>readability) describe the structure of an HTML document, or does it have
>more to do more with appearance?
>

The bold and italics tags are rather controversial since they
do violate the spirit of SGML.  The preferred alternatives are
the strong and emphasized tags.  In fact, more recent versions
of HTML deprecate those features that affect appearance and
now the preferred way to specify appearance issues is through
style sheets.

Tables are another controversial item.  Their original use was
definitely to describe the structure of tabular data.  You can
certainly use tables to suggest how the browser should layout
the document on the screen, but in many cases you can't count
on different browsers rendering the table the same way.  For
example, the width tag in cells is ignored by some browsers.
Also, cell background images render differently.  (But then,
who in their right mind uses background images in their HTML
docs?)

>
>Yes, it used to mess with HTML a lot more, but you have much more control
>over it now. Look, FP has grown up. Why treat it as a version 1 product
>when it's at version 4 (aka FP 2000)? Everyone knows that the third and
>fourth versions of Microsoft products are the first usable versions <g>.
>
>>One thing turned me off of WYSIWYG editors:  I was chatting with
>>an exhibitor at a model train show a couple of years ago.  They
>>were advertising the URL of their web page, but they told me that
>>the web page wasn't up yet. They were running some MS HTML editor,
>>which hung the system.  They found that the motherboard was fried!
>>They complained to microsft.  MS eventually agreed to replace the
>>MB, but only after the company threatened to go to the press with
>>their complaint!
>
>FrontPage fried the motherboard? I hope you're kidding about this, but I
>don't see any <g>'s in your text.
>

I'm not kidding - that is exactly what they told me.  And
based on what I had read about MS products, it didn't
surprise me one bit.

But I'm sure FP is muuuch better now.

Cheers!  Hans

Hans Boldt, ILE RPG Development, IBM Toronto Lab, boldt@ca.ibm.com


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