[ale] OT easy html editor

[William Fragakis]

There have been a number of comments regarding using html and CSS and 
taking me to task for saying that html is not a print layout language 
(and, indeed, it was never meant to be - otherwise, one could hit the 
space bar to one's heart's content and not worry about using    ie 
html won't display more than one space at a time unless you use the 
encoding for a space). Please go back and read the original request. 
Someone who may not have an extensive computing background or resources 
is trying to do a one to two page newsletter and needs a better way.

Using HTML + CSS to accomplish this is like using a tank to drive to 
the grocery store for the average user, imho. It takes a really good 
understanding of coding both HTML and CSS to accomplish this, and 
lacking that knowledge, an expensive proprietary wysiwyg editor like 
Dreamweaver.  CSS is a pain enough to deal with in web pages if trying 
to be very specific in layout.

HTML was never meant to be a _layout_ language. It recognized that the 
coder had no control over the viewing environment in terms of fonts 
available, display area or screen resolution. This is never more 
obvious than being in a school loaded with 800 x 600 monitors trying to 
view a page written by someone who has a nice, sparkling 19" 1280 x 960 
monitor and loves to use the full width- "Well, it looks fine on my 
computer." - while the rest of us are scrolling right to see what was 
hidden.

CSS makes it display like one, for example, by defining locations and 
font sizes in specific terms. Yes, CSS does a good job but you have to 
really know what you are doing to do it well - as a Mac user, I can't 
tell you how many times somebody using Windows makes the CSS type 
specification on a web page unreadably small for me. And then, you 
still aren't accounting for browser differences (again, the original 
poster didn't think he would even use Mozilla). I think a missionary 
has better things to do than figure out how many pixels over or down he 
needs the headline to be and where to put his img tags and what specs 
he needs for every div and span. He wants to type a few words, throw in 
a picture or two and be done with it.

I don't want to assume that someone who is having fits doing a two page 
newsletter in Printshop is about to learn all the specs of CSS and whip 
out notepad and write code. I've been writing html for years and still 
struggle with the more arcane parts of CSS - one could be nasty and 
assert that I have trouble with the more elementary parts as well ;-).

As well, there are plenty of freeware, shareware and OSS ways of 
dealing with .pdfs. My take is that he's creating a newsletter and 
printing it out or emailing it along ("opening")- no mention was even 
made of displaying it on the web. .pdfs have their virtues - they [can] 
carry their own fonts and images. If our missionary friend wants to use 
some obscure font he's found - and what Printshop user doesn't - how 
does he _easily_ accomplish that in html/css?

You may disagree - yes, in a strict sense I'm wrong but, then, I often 
have trouble parking my tank at Publix. I think the suggestions about 
using something like OpenOffice Writer are more appropriate.

Regards,
William




On Jan 23, 2006, at 5:42 PM, George Carless wrote:

> On Mon, Jan 23, 2006 at 05:19:20PM -0500, William Fragakis wrote:
>> Printshop + newsletter != html
>>
>> I'm confused why the need for an html wysiwyg editor for a newsletter.
>> html is for web pages (and Front Page does a crappy job of it).
>
> I'll just weigh in and say that this is in many ways quite an
> old-fashioned outlook.  The combination of HTML+CSS is quite a powerful
> one, quite capable of producing fairly complex layouts for both screen
> and print, without the cruft that something like PDFs bring along and
> with the benefits garnered from having things in an easily readable,
> easily modified, non-proprietary standard that can be readily used for
> multiple media (with different styles for each media as appropriate).
> There are gaps, sure, but I don't think that dismissing HTML for this
> purpose is really appropriate.
>
> --George
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