Page creation and maintenance tools for Windows 3.11

[Thomas Dowling]

-----Original Message-----
From: Library Internet Resources Co-ordinator <webguru at gtu.edu>
To: Multiple recipients of list <web4lib at library.berkeley.edu>
Date: Tuesday, September 30, 1997 1:04 PM
Subject: Re: Page creation and maintenance tools for Windows 3.11


>remember that many WYSIWYG tools may not always stick to standard HTML.
>


Indeed.  In the process of evaluating HTML editors for staff here, I
recently did a little experiment.  I wrote an HTML 3.2 document with a text
editor, validated it, and then did nothing but open it and immediately save
it in a number of editors.  I then tried writing an equivalent document from
scratch in each of the editors.  Among graphical editors, I tried Adobe
Pagemill, Claris Home Page, Netscape Composer, Microsoft FrontPad (aka
FrontPage Express), Microsoft Word 97, and HoTMetaL Pro 3.0.  Of these, only
FrontPad and HoTMetaL managed to open and save a valid HTML file without
introducing errors (and that's giving FrontPad the favor of ignoring its
patently wrong DOCTYPE).  Only HoTMetaL avoided making any substantive
changes to my original document, as did two tag-based editors, HotDog and
HomeSite.

Adobe and Claris both added proprietary elements or attributes.  Adobe
insisted on inserting invalid percentage widths in my TD elements and
changed <DIV ALIGN="CENTER">...</DIV> to <P><CENTER>...</CENTER></P> (Wrong!
Wrong!  Wrong!).  Claris changed <DIV ALIGN="CENTER">...</DIV><HR> to
<P><DIV ALIGN="CENTER">...</DIV><HR></P>.  Go figure.

Composer only introduced one validation error, but took a number of
liberties with my source, substituting <I> for <EM>, adding superfluous nbsp
entities, stripping quotes from attribute values, stripping closing </P>
tags (especially dumb given their browser's history of mishandling elements
that leave out optional closing tags).  All I can say about Word is that it
seems to be using the Haphazard Tag Mess-up Language.

If anything, there were slightly more validation errors when I recreated the
original document from scratch.

If you'd like to see the results of this nonsense, it's at
http://www.ohiolink.edu/~tdowling/editors/   The file test.html is the
original document, written in WordPad.  "test-xxxx.html" is the test
document opened and immediately saved in editor xxxx, and
"test-xxxx-scratch.html" is the attempted recreation in editor xxxx.  The
file editors-report.txt has the nsgmls validation errors.

Validation fun 'n' games: go to Netscape's Open Standards Guarantee at
http://search.netscape.com/comprod/columns/intranet/open_standards.html
View the source.  Scroll down to the bottom.  See that little <LAYER> tag
down there?...  Makes me wonder exactly what's under the hood of their LDAP,
IIOP, SSL, etc. implementations.  You can't view source on those.


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