On Wed, May 24, 2000 at 08:12:02AM +0000, Samy Elashmawy wrote:
Huy Guys,
I have never written a line of html code , besides a few lines to start a java tutorial app , Why is it so difficult for the gui/wsywig editers to do html layout , why the need for hand editing ?
Perhaps because HTML was _designed_ to separate the presentation of content from the content itself. The original idea was that the author knows how the pieces of the content connect together a lot better than the viewer, and the browser knows a lot more about the local display environment of the viewer. Thus the author publishes the material, all linked together by HTML (structurally speaking), and lets let the browser sort out the presentation for the viewer according to local capabilities/preferences. Since HTML was designed primarily for providing access to content, which has almost nothing to do with the particulars of display and presentation, its tools for (especially) things like layout are primitive and unreliable. Expecting What You See on your monitor to survive a trip through HTML and be What They Get is largely an exercise in blind faith. This makes sense if you think about it. Even with hints like "color=" and "font=" modifiers, how can you expect something designed for one specific combination of display resolution/dpi/depth/color bandwidth/ browser/font collection/etc in mind to render in an identical manner in someone else's browser, which may actually be a braille-reader or a text-to-speech converter? Answer: you can't, any more than you can get Star Office to run on a tty. You just can't get there from here. You can, of course, approximate the effect by not supporting browsers that don't display your layout "correctly", but then you're starting to depend on implementation details again. This is basically what you're doing when you use a "WYSIWYG" tool for HTML coding and expecting it to produce code that displays the same in everyone else's browser just like it does in yours. Having access to content dependant on browser details is exactly what HTML was designed to avoid. The 4.01 docs, such as the one at, http://www.w3.org/TR/1999/REC-html401-19991224/intro/intro.html repeatedly stress accessibility and contain notes like, "At the time of writing, some HTML authoring tools rely extensively on tables for formatting, which may easily cause accessibility problems." .. pointedly drawing attention to problems caused by "WYSIWYG" tools trying to fit the square HTML peg into the round DTP hole. Now, I'm definitely not saying that GUI tools don't have their uses, but do realize that their advantages are limited to making the author's (or web designer's) life easier by making the HTML linking less of a chore. You _cannot_ depend on them to provide any influence over the user agents' (aka browsers') presentation of the material to the viewers. If you want a lot of control over presentation you'll have to rely on something other than HTML. PDF, Flash and Java come immediately to mind, and there are probably other tools that will also work. Use them instead of trying to make HTML do things it is not good for and not designed for. (Apologies in advance for the list abuse ... flames/replies/etc to me personally at jmgrant@primenet.com.) -- To unsubscribe send e-mail to suse-linux-e-unsubscribe@suse.com For additional commands send e-mail to suse-linux-e-help@suse.com Also check the FAQ at http://www.suse.com/Support/Doku/FAQ/