[thelist] re: My 12 year old son can do websites
David Dorward
evolt at david.us-lot.org
Thu Jan 29 05:09:33 CST 2004
On 29 Jan 2004, at 10:15, john at johnallsopp.co.uk wrote:
> Won't we wake up one day to find the Dreamweaver people have taken over
> and can produce semantically marked up web pages cheaper, faster and
> with
> higher quality than we can by hand?
Maybe, but its going to be a long time before computers are smart
enough to
understand meaning in text and produce semantic markup from it.
> Is the main problem with WYSIWYG software that it doesn't do it very
> well
> (proprietary/redundant code, that kinda thing)? Perhaps that the code
> is
> overcomplex so it's difficult to maintain and when a problem arises,
> it's
> difficult to fix. But as the software improves, and the complexity of
> the
> task increases, won't there be a moment when, sensibly, we should
> switch?
There are two issues with so-called-WYSIWYG editors:
(1) HTML - they can't know what the user means, so they can't know what
the
right markup is.
Its perfectly possible for a WYSIWYM editor (like LyX) to do a decent
job,
but I haven't seen any of those for HTML yet. (Mozilla Computer and
Amaya
seem promising - but the former isn't very WYSIWYM yet, and the latter
has
a horrible UI).
(2) CSS - I've yet to see an editor which can produce layouts using CSS
without
using pixel based, fixed width (and sometimes fixed height) layouts -
at least
without the user going in and setting values by hand.
> For instance, no-one suggested I should hand code that P3P stuff,
> because
> it was an XML file .. every suggestion was that I needed a WYSIWYG aid.
> Yet the file itself was fairly clear.
Isn't P3P a matter of picking options from a list rather then trying to
describe
a layout? This sort of thing is very easy to produce a point and click
tool for,
it deals in absolutes - and design is full of variables.
--
David Dorward
http://dorward.me.uk/
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