Roger, Whilst I fully agree with your sentiment of clean HTML, and keeping it simple, my problem is that I want to change operating system on 90 or so staff, some of which can just about change their departments intranet pages by point and click in dreamweaver, the thoughts of them trying to learn HTML if frightening to say the least! Perhaps instead of WYSIWYG I should have said Graphical? Anybody else done anything similar? Rob keeling Network Manager Queen Elizabeth`s Grammar School Ashbourne ----- Original Message ----- From: "Roger Beaumont" To: "Rob Keeling" ; Sent: Thursday, April 04, 2002 11:54 PM Subject: Re: [suse-linux-uk-schools] Linux Based WYSIWYG HTML editor?

At 19:51 03/04/02 +0100, you wrote:

...

I am looking for a WYSIWYG html editor to maintain our schools website, we are currently using windows and Dreamweaver, but I would like to start using LTSP and need to find a simple web page editor, we don`t use a fraction of the features in Dreamweaver most of the time so I was wondering if anyone had any recomendations?

Hi Rob,

My advice would be to avoid all WYSINWYG web editors like the plague, unless you are what seems to me to be unbelievably expert - or all systems used to view the page are identical. Each browser/version/screen-resolution/colour-depth/OS/etc. combination will render any given page in a slightly different way - even before you consider different user settings. What YOU See Is NOT What Anyone Else Will Get!

Keep the code simple enough to handle in a standard text editor and you are likely to end up with HTML that renders sensibly on any system, while if you use a so-called WYSYWYG editor, you end up with code so complicated that you need a grade 1 guru to de-bug it (mind you, I'm only grade 3 ;^)

Good networking,

Roger Beaumont

On Fri, Apr 05, 2002 at 09:33:40AM +0100, Rob Keeling wrote:

Roger,

Whilst I fully agree with your sentiment of clean HTML, and keeping it simple, my problem is that I want to change operating system on 90 or so staff, some of which can just about change their departments intranet pages by point and click in dreamweaver, the thoughts of them trying to learn HTML if frightening to say the least!

Perhaps instead of WYSIWYG I should have said Graphical?

The problem with using a specific application such as a graphical html application is that the skills learnt in finding your way around the application are not transferable and almost certainly not across platforms. You say that the staff are barely able to use Dreamweaver and hence suppose that them marking up html by hand is a non-starter. I think that supposition is false. Whilst I don't know Dreamweaver I do know that most of all the graphical applications that I've used are opaque and difficult to use. On the contrary, html documents are structured, logical and if you write compliant html will adhere to a DTD. So for anybody with half a brain cell (and I'll rashly include teachers in that category ;), marking-up html by hand is more logical because the structure of your document and how the tags work becomes apparent to you as you build up and write your document. In fact, it will make more sense to them than to grovel around the menus of some graphical html application. So my advice would be to put some pages up on your intranet on how to use a syntax highlighting editor (vim - cross-platform) and then some pages about how to go about using it to write html. Provide them with a template document in html that makes use of a cascading style sheet. By doing that you will impose a style on the html pages that are common across the school ie. bold text, code etc. will appear in one way only. Produce a document(s) that make use of all the defined tags and show them how to use the `view as source' facility on their browser. Show them how to cut and paste from there into their text editor. Drill into them the advantages of using the css and the consistent structure it will impose on their work. Help yourself to my stylesheet if you like & hack it to suit your own needs: http://www.esperance-linux.co.uk/style/default.css & an example of it in action: http://www.esperance-linux.co.uk/misc/zetnet.html Show them how to use htmltidy to parse their html and clean it up: http://www.w3.org/People/Raggett/tidy/ Provide links to the various tutorials at w3c with regards writing html. Provide a couple of books in the school library on html and using the text editor. This might all seem like a lot of work and it probably is in the short term but the long term advantages are considerable: They will have learnt a mark-up language so they will be able to write other mark-up languages without too much difficulty XML, LaTeX -> pdf etc. because once you're familiar with how one works you're pretty familiar with how they all work. They will have learnt how to use a (decent) text editor which they can then use whether they're sending email, writing programs, editing configuration files etc. They can use the text editor on any platform that they choose to work on. They'll then be in a position to start learning the more advanced features of that editor such as search and replace. They have then learnt about regular expressions and are in a position to go on to learn about using grep, sed, perl etc. All of a sudden they find that learning bespoke GUI applications was a complete waste of time and they're indoctrinated into the unix philosophy and that is now their platform of choice. What's more they've got a true understanding of how some very important computing technologies work. They can then go onto teach their pupils how to produce standards compliant html rather than showing them how to navigate through some braindead, non-sensical menu system of a GUI application. They can show them the advantages of structured documentation: structured documentation = structured ideas. The school can then boast that all it's staff and pupils are able to write html. This is a considerable boast as the layman thinks that writing html involves heavy wizardry/rocket science. The fact is it doesn't, it's trained monkey stuff (but keep that quiet). What's even better is that when the MS salesman comes calling next you can sling him out of the door without him clutching a huge cheque in his sweaty palm and you can invest the money into something more worthwhile than crappy software. -- Frank *-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-* Boroughbridge. Tel: 01423 323019 --------- PGP keyID: 0xC0B341A3 *-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-* http://www.esperance-linux.co.uk/ How many seconds are there in a year? If I tell you there are 3.155 x 10^7, you won't even try to remember it. On the other hand, who could forget that, to within half a percent, pi seconds is a nanocentury. -- Tom Duff, Bell Labs

If you can produce a web page in a text editor then USE Frontpage (2000 onwards) or Dreamweaver. They will produce good code if used for the basics (ie don't use them to produce a page like you would in a graphical word processor) James Carter South Lee School