WYSIWYG editors and extraneous code

[Thomas Dowling]

>I guess I think back to the fun of dot commands in Script or original
>WordStar.  They are a perfect analogy for HTML tags, as we used to have to
>put .in5 in the left margin every time we wanted a line indented five
>spaces, and .pa for each paragraph, etc, etc.  For all I know now, the
>codes hidden in Word97 are equally bloated, but do I care?  Nope.  It does
>the job.  Period.
>


You only say that because it actually seems to do what its users agree is
"the job."  If, for example, WordPerfect8 users suddenly discovered that
they couldn't open a Word97 document because Microsoft wasn't actually
adhering to a spec they claimed to use, all hell would break loose.  If
Microsoft, Corel, and one or two other parties started arguing about what
constituted the spec, what constituted adherence, what version of the spec
should be supported, etc., you'd have a more accurate analogy.

Bear in mind that HTML (which really is a simple language, even with all the
fluff that's been added to it) is only the tip of the iceberg on the
forthcoming Web.  There's Java, JavaScript, HTTP, XML, CSS, CORBA and IIOP,
LDAP, and one or more flavors of Dynamic HTML, to name a few.   That's grad
school, and everyone's flunking out of Standards 101.

And every step along the way, there will be editors and development
platforms, and every time we'll have some that seem to get the job done, but
are pulling all sorts of proprietary, let's-stick-it-to-the-other-guy tricks
under the hood.  Netscape Composer's nonsensical HTML tagging helps set my
expectations for Enterprise Server's LDAP support, and I can't view source
on LDAP support to see what it's really doing.

Thomas Dowling
OhioLINK - Ohio Library and Information Network
tdowling at ohiolink.edu