[thelist] file viewers vs file editors

Jorah Lavin madstone at madstone.net
Tue Aug 19 03:23:05 CDT 2003


At 18:41 08/18/03, Bill Haenel wrote:
>No big yank here - just find it an interesting subject. Yes, we DO use
>our testing tools as the final product. Weird, eh?

Widen your view. (BTW, no nerves here, either, I'm seeing it as an 
interesting topic, as well). If I'm recalling my Web history correctly, 
when Tim Berners-Lee invented HTML and the browser, he envisioned the 
browser being used to _edit_ the pages, too.  I think that Amaya is set up 
that way, even now, so the idea may not be strange, even though it may be 
weird.

Anyway,  in pre-Web days, a typesetter working in a computer environment 
would have used a typesetting program to design the page (possibly! it is 
also possible that the typesetter software just spit out columns of type 
and the page was assembled by hand... the small newspaper where I worked in 
1993 was still doing that) and the product was viewed in printed form. It 
wouldn't be very pleasant to read a document in PageMaker, and very few 
people will use PhotoShop to view .jpg files. However, while I don't doubt 
that text/document editors such as MS Word were originally designed to use 
the same way as PageMaker... a content provider or document editor creates 
a document which is viewed in the hard-copy version, I suspect that a 
_large_ percentage of Word documents are actually viewed _in Word_ these 
days... one of the side effects of the move of the computer from primarily 
a production tool to (in my life) primarily a communication tool.

I'm also typing this note to you in the same editor, -Eudora- that I used 
to read your original note... doesn't seem strange or weird.

Next point: This is something that my clean-HTML-loving self took a long 
time to accept: Most (the vast majority, I suspect) of the people putting 
content online are NOT DEVELOPERS! They are authors, typists, designers. It 
is right and proper to hide the code from them, the same way that the 
"code" is hidden from me in a Word document that I'm writing, the same way 
it is hidden from me in PageMaker. I finally realized that the _real_ 
reason that I hated tools (hack, cough, spit) like FrontPage _isn't_ 
because they hide the HTML from the content creator, but because the HTML 
they output was so atrocious that there was a good chance that you wouldn't 
even be able to view the result in anything but IE. (I'm talking about FP 
in the days when I first encountered it, 5 or 6 years ago... I'm told that 
there have been improvements, and I'm not trying to start a flame fest). 
The model where a file is only viewable in the software that created it, 
which is somewhat acceptable in the case of MS Word documents, isn't 
acceptable _to me_  in the Web environment, where HTML docs were supposed 
to be viewable, even if they didn't look exactly the same way, in any 
decent browsing tool.

For what it is worth, I do my preliminary testing on HTML files in my 
editor's code-checking subroutine, then validate it against an online 
validator. Then I check to see if it is readable in IE, the only browser my 
audience is using.  So I'm not really testing with the final product, 
except in the sense that someone who builds a road does the final "check" 
by driving on the road...

Just my thoughts, (at 4 in the morning) and as a wise man once said, they 
are worth what you paid for them.

-Jorah




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