Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

Re: Fighting Back for the Mac™

Author:Oliver Breidenbach
Posted:1/9/2000; 12:57:05 PM
Topic:Now it makes more sense
Msg #:14271 (In response to 14269)
Prev/Next:14270 / 14272

* You can use any number of HTML-capable platform independent GUI toolkits such as Tk, WXWindows, Qt, ...

Please, no. There's a huge difference between the basic HTML that those libraries can render and the real HTML that I want to work with. If a Web authoring tool has a preview feature, I want a preview of my page to look pixel-identical to how it would look in one of the big two browsers. That basically means that it has to use the rendering engine from one of the big two browsers.

Dave & Wesley,

excuse me, but that is really handing the Internet over to Bill. It is the "proprietary standards" way. Let´s face it: HTML sucks, big time! And it doesn´t help that MSIE HTML sucks a little less. In the end it is Office all over again: First you standardize, then you become dependent.

Trust me, this is not what you want: Choose now and regret later.

The big big problem is that HTML never was intended to define exact appearance, and it still does not. There is not even a specification exact enough to qualify as WYSIWYG. The standards are set by the implementations and that is a bad thing! Now we all go CSS and guess what: is it 72 dpi or 96 dpi? What happens if you render it in, say 4096 dpi on a lino typesetter?

I would like to see Manila get more INDEPENDENT of the target: HTML, WML, XML, PDF, Flash, DHTML, whatever. Use the editing to define a content structure, then use easy to use and define templates to render the content in the desired target format.

It´s Dave´s choice, ultimately, but what I miss in Manila is some simple JAVA Applet that has basic HTML editing features and uses XML-RPC to talk to the database.

WYSIWYG is a joke with HTML (and still so with DHTML), so why not do it differently?

Cheers,

Oliver.

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