On 02/27/2011 09:34 AM, don kretz wrote:
... no one has been able to develop an HTML editor that normal people can use.
That's BS. There are lots of HTML editors out there that people use. The underlying problem is: That even if your machine for processing horse manure has windows and a mouse and drop-down menus and animated icons, its output is still horse manure.
Certainly not one with the sophistication to enable them to use the breadth of markup required to even edit the poor meagre subset of syntactical information (not even chapters) incorporated into the elegant products coming from DP.
ROTFL. They may be elegant but they are non-functional. They work on desktop-sized screens only, for suitably small values of 'work': Try to narrow your browser window to the typical 5-6 words per line of a mobile phone. Breakage galore! And, yes!, a substantial portion of PG downloads go to mobile phones.
Microsoft has failed. Adobe has failed (and they have the only product that has real traction for highly technical users.) Google keeps trying with Google Docs, but that's clearly unsatisfactory.
The fundamental problem of WYSIWYG is that you can 'see' only the presentation. The semantics you have to infer with your brains. That's hard if your brain has been rotted by a lifetime of WYSIWYG use. HTML is a purely presentational markup and shares all the problems of WYSIWYG and adds some of its own. It is practically impossible to teach good markup to people that have had a prior exposure to HTML: as potential markup editors they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration. (This doesn't preclude that HTML is a good machine format. It just isn't suited for authoring. You don't write your code in assembler.)
What is technically possible with HTML, X or otherwise, makes no difference at all unless there's an editor supporting it that is approximately as easy to use as what people write their emails with, and captures syntactic artifacts.
Machines cannot capture semantic yet. (And when they do, Google's automatic output will surpass DP's human output not only in quantity but also in quality, thus making DP obsolete.) DP should have educated their processors about semantic markup. They have failed this in the same way they have soundly slept thru the technological changes of the last 5 years. (At least I wasn't able to find a single FAQ about sematic markup at DP and DP's output doesn't look like they are getting it.) Until the average person at DP cannot tell a paragraph from not a paragraph, every discussion about formats and tools is moot. -- Marcello Perathoner webmaster@gutenberg.org