[thelist] WYSIWYG editors (was: WebReview responds to WaSP)

[Calum I Mac Leod]

> Fortune Elkins:
> > hiya!

Hi there.  I don't want anyone here to think that I'm trying to put WYSIWYG
users down, (as such ;-).  As I mentioned, I don't believe that a good
authorer can't use DW to produce good markup, or that DW's a bad product.
It's the assumption that it's quicker that continues to trouble me...

> > don't know about newbies.... if i do say so myself, i'm pretty good with
> > HTML, but i think that DW4 *does* increase my productivity dramatically.
its
> > template feature and library items are great;

But templates didn't begin with DW, and templates don't end with DW.  I
can't remember the last time I made Web pages without using templates (not
that I really make many pages as such, these days).  I really wish that the
stuff I put up three years ago used sensible templates, and had better
structure.  It's not suited to repurposing, integration or aggregation, and
I regret that.  Still, I digress.

Do you mean that DW's templates are better (joke ;-), or that Macromedia's
generation tools are faster to use?  I don't see that templates can
generally be marked up faster via a WYSIWYG interface.

> > when used in conjunction with
> > FW4 menus and graphics, my productivity goes through the roof.

I don't personally originate graphics, but I'm quite happy with the results
of others using origination tools such as Illustrator and Photoshop, and
optimisation tools such as the better Adobe filters or Paint Shop Pro.  I
also know daily DW users who _much_ prefer to bring the graphics in from
other app's (including other Macromedia app's).

> > recently i've
> > found myself able to crank out up to 40 or even 60 pages in a 7-hr. day!
i
> > redid our archived press release section -- about 150 pages -- in just
2-1/2
> > days. no overtime, just cutting and pasting and editing the content from
a
> > big MS Word doc.

But why is this a feature of WYSIWYG?  We give customers browser based
access to update content;  we give customers MS Access tables and forms to
help them enter their data;  we receive comma delimited text files from
customers.  Neither they nor we seem to need a WYSIWYG editor to merge these
with templates.

> > then when they asked me to change all the graphics, i bought some stock
art
> > online, made the new graphics in about 2 hours, used FW to make the 6
new
> > menus in about 40 mins., and applied them to all the pages with the
template
> > and library item update feature in about 10 mins. then i rechecked the
pages
> > to ensure no links were broken and printed out a nice report. that
dropped
> > some jaws around the office! <grin>
<snip>

I see your story as being a reflection of your ability, not DW's.  DW is the
visual editor least likely to get in the way of making good Web pages, but I
don't see that it makes 150 pages for you any more than mod_perl, Zope,
midgard, MiniVend, XSLT, a hand-rolled CMS or custom templating tool.

You can probably see where I'm going with this,  but the next paragraph
highlights one part of my confusion about WYSIWYG evangelists:

> > sure the code could probably be trimmed a bit. ok, so if you code by
hand
> > and save say 100 lines but it takes you 2 days, forget about it.

But it doesn't take 2 days extra to write a template by hand.  Some of us
believe it's generally quicker.  Indeed, I'd say that the oft described
process of working on a page twice, (first in DW to get 'the look', then by
hand to tidy it up) wastes time.  In my experience it takes longer to fix a
page than to write a page.  The good thing about DW is that it can produce
pages that don't need fixing.  The bad thing about DW is that most of its
users treat it as DTP.

I can understand that a highly complex set of TABLEs and floating, with a
proliferation of FONTs, etc. can be fairly painful to figure out in Notepad.
But this is also where generation tools so often upset NetExploder (again,
not necessarily 'coz they're bad).

Well thought out, nicely structured HTML lends itself to easy styling with
CSS (if only the browsers had been a little less hasty to give us bad
implementations).  It's easy in DW, it's easy without DW.

> > this ideal
> > of "perfect" code is great; we do appreciate elegance in technology. but
in
> > the real world where time is money and the site has to be up the same
day,
> > i'm sticking with DW4/UD4. <grin>
> >
> > of course, ymmv.

It does.  It really, really does.  I spend far more time planning site
navigation paths, data structures, TITLE content and other search engine
hooks than I do telling some script to compile a bunch of Web pages from
databases & templates (writing browser based editing scripts takes
considerably more time for someone like me who's no more than an adequate
Perl scripter).

Similarly, we spend more time cropping images than we do writing templates.
*Except*, where we (in this case, generally _I_) get handed a bunch of
so-called templates from some k3wl "it looked OK on my browser" dude who
didn't care that it turns to mush on Nav4.  When it comes out of our system
it's supposed not to turn to mush on Nav4.  That's when I thank css.nu and
style.webreview.com for their existence, and it's when I _hate_ the
browsers; almost enough to join Zeldman in practice as well as spirit.  Oh,
except that I get paid to do it.  ;-)

Jake Stetser:
>
<snip>
> Some people believe that all they need is a WYSIWYG and not a clear
> understanding of HTML. I don't follow that philosophy. Any tool is
dangerous
> unless you know how to use it correctly, and that involves an
understanding
> of the materials.

Yup, and that's what I am (and I think others are) complaining about.
Putting the DTP tool (sorry, WYSIWYG Web design software ;-) on a newbie's
desk is dangerous.  We can have "device-independent, system-independent
methods of representing texts in electronic form"[1] without limiting
ourselves to pages of dull, grey text.

There are far too many deezyner dudes who haven't realised that Standard
Generalized Markup is _the_point_.  It's why search engines work, and it's
why you can use the _same_ page whether you run Nav6 on a top end PC, Lynx
on an old 'nix box (with SSL patch) or whatever's next.

Otherwise, we could just live with Flash and PDF.  After all, both have
hyperlinks, and both can be delivered by HTTP.

> I'll often use it for rapidly developing a layout, and then go in and
tweak,
> clean and optimize by hand. Best of both worlds!

We'll differ on that, I think.  ;-)

[1] Nicked from "A Gentle Introduction to SGML"

Calum
--
  "The Semantic Web is an attempt, largely, to map large quantities of
   existing data onto a common langauge so that the data can be
   analysed in ways never dreamed of by its creators" - Tim BL 1998