Re: HTML Editor: a project

do us all a favor and try to write your editor so it produces html that actually conforms to the relevant standards. if you can do that, i, and a large community of web programmers would be very impressed.

this means (among others):

inserting the correct DOCTYPE
attributes="quoted"
using tags for what they semantically represent rather than for visual effects (eg, <blockquote> should only be used around a blockquote, not just as a generic way to indent a paragraph)
proper closing and nesting of elements. (<p> has a closing tag and goes around paragraphs, not between them).
your application should not ever produce deprecated or proprietary tags like <font> or <marquee>

most of the existing html editors (dreamweaver, frontpage, golive, etc) fail pretty miserably on these kinds of things.

anders pearson

Comment on Re: HTML Editor: a project

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Re^2: HTML Editor: a project by Aristotle (Chancellor) on Jun 26, 2002 at 14:47 UTC
Just an interjection: a problem with using tags for semantical rather than visual representation is that the average HTML monkey at the keyboard will use these tags for their optical effect anyway. If he sees that <blockquote>s are displayed invented, he'll use <blockquote>s to indent things and the only way to prevent that would be to ask him about five times in a row whether he is indeed using the tag for a quote. The concept of semantical markup vs visual layout is a distinction that has to take place in the author's mind and cannot be made by his tool. Of course, the tool should make the distinction possible; but it can't enforce proper use of HTML. Sadly. Makeshifts last the longest.	[reply]
Re: Re^2: HTML Editor: a project by thraxil (Prior) on Jun 26, 2002 at 16:05 UTC
yeah, it'll never be a replacement for the user being educated about proper markup techniques. but i think that an editor whose overarching principle is generating correct semantic markup with presentation secondary would go a long way. at the very least, it would then be a useful tool for those authors who do care more about correct markup. what i'm saying is instead of having an 'indent paragraph' button that just generates a blockquote, you would have a 'blockquote' button and maybe somewhere else an actual 'indent paragraph' button which applies the right <acronym title="Cascading Style Sheets">CSS</acronym> rules to the selected paragraph. i guess what i'd like is sort of an html oriented LyX. anders pearson	[reply]
Re^4: HTML Editor: a project by Aristotle (Chancellor) on Jun 26, 2002 at 16:17 UTC
I know; and I definitely support the idea. I think we would get a long way towards this by a throwing the WYSIWYG approach away and using a moded editor. Text entry mode not allow for layout choices; it would only produce markup and both try to guess what the user is doing (double linebreak = paragraph, f.ex) as well as explicity ask him to mark up his text ("this is a headline"). Text would not appear formatted in entry mode either. Layout mode would not allow for text or markup entry. Only formatting choices for existing markup can be made here: select a headline, and you can adjust the CSS formatting for that level of headline, or make choices for the specific headline in question (via a classname), or both. <span> tags might be an allowed exception. Makeshifts last the longest.	[reply]