[whatwg] Semantics in WYSIWYG

Maniac Maniac at SoftwareManiacs.Org
Tue Aug 30 07:37:29 PDT 2005


Jim Ley wrote:

>Absolutely, which is why you constrain the problem to something manageable.
>  
>
My point is that constraining a toolset doesn't make WYSIWYG editing 
more manageable from semantics point of view. If users don't care about 
semantics they just will be irritated with constraints they don't 
understand.

On the contrary I think that the editor should provide more controls: 
semantic ones and presentational. They shloud be very clearly separated 
and their result should just look differently. The idea is to show users 
this difference and expect them to use appropriate tools for their task.

This, however, won't work for the majority of people who doesn't care if 
they should use <i> or <em>. But not only because it's just hard to make 
clear distinction between them in a WYSIWYG environment. I also don't 
think that software can somehow force people to think more beyond their 
immediate needs, about things like 'benefits of semantic markup for the 
network as a whole'...

P.S. This and previous my posting aren't actually related to the 
contentEditable vs. accept="text/html" argument. Thus changing the 
subject...



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