[ale] OT easy html editor

[George Carless]

[snip]

> 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.

William,

These are fair points, although I would take issue with the notion that 
HTML+CSS is in general "a tank": its specification is really quite 
straightforward, and quite elegant--but of course you are correct to 
observe that browsers can make life quite difficult, as of course can 
issues such as font availability.  And it is true that HTML+CSS in 
general is still not ideal for certain tasks - but it *has* come a long 
way, and I think it would be wrong to dismiss it out of hand in favour 
of PDFs, just as it might (to veer on-topic) to dismiss Linux out of 
hand because it's "too difficult": HTML+CSS has in many ways the promise 
to obviate the need for PDFs in many arenas, and if it has areas in 
which it needs to improve then it nonetheless has many of the 
foundations correct; and, of course, the development of tools to serve 
as a front-end for, say, positional CSS might go a way towards this 
(after all, it's not as though any end user/publisher gets his or her 
hands dirty dealing with the esoterica of how the pdf is actually 'put 
together': they have tools to do that.

Now, it's true that HTML+CSS isn't necessarily there yet, nor either 
designed to or likely to replace a dedicated DTP tool; but I would still 
argue that for a reasonably simple task such as putting together a 
newsletter, it remains a fairly straightforward and effective tool for 
the job.  There is something of a learning curve, but in the long term 
I'd say it's worthwhile: a newsletter that can be quickly and easily 
restyled to suit print, the screen, or (at some point) a handheld 
device--or that can take on a new design at any time--has a number 
of advantages over one cobbled together with yet another proprietary 
tool.

I'm a bit of an idealist, I grant you--but I also do this for a living 
and I've experienced first-hand how great it can be when, confronted 
with the sudden unexpected need to implement a dramatic redesign or to 
reuse content in some new way, it's been reduced to a matter of changing 
a stylesheet or running a simple script.  I mentioned one of our 
designers who has been using Dreamweaver for CSS--she recently took some 
CSS that I'd written for one of our newsletters and impemented an entire 
new design for it, without having any great understanding of CSS and 
without modifying my underling xhtml at all.  So I don't think that 
things are necessarily as complex as you find them; but if they are, I 
think that will continue to improve as tools do and as Web browsers etc. 
get better.

And besides--this is ALE: although sometimes the "well, this way is 
easier right now" approach can do the trick, isn't there a certain 
appeal to the more elegant, more 'correct' approach, even--or even 
because--it's more challenging? ;)

--George