[whatwg] Authoring tools

[Sander Tekelenburg]

At 00:48 -0500 UTC, on 2006-12-04, Mike Schinkel wrote:

> Sander Tekelenburg wrote:

[...]

> Forum posting is but one of many contexts. I daresay non-technical people
> who write blogs and wikis care about format, as do even forum posters.

[...]

> I think defining people in these two groups where one doesn't case about
> what it looks like and the other will have the skills is either naive or
> just wishing thinking.

I scetched two *general* groups, to keep things simple. Of course not
everybody will fit in either one. In fact most people will not fall in either
group most of the time ;)

The point was though, that there is a group who doesn't care or is even in
fact quite happy if the AWPS [automated web publishing system] fixes their
markup automagically.  The'y're not going to wet themselves just because
their 5 empty lines resulted in 1 empty line.

Others will indeed want more control (and will have to carry the
responsibiity that comes with that). I'm sure in this group you'll find
everything in a range from minor to major control. My point was that it would
be good if authoring systems would offer 'control modes' to accomodate those
different groups better.

Everybody's different, so there in the end there is no way to truly define
people in terms of groups. Not only that, many people will belong to a
different group in different situations. (One moment you're writing a CMS,
the other you're entering some some basic wiki syntax or markdown on a blog
or forum.)

>>> Yeah, that should help. There are already a few
>>> tools out there, that AWPS authors can integrate
>>> within their product. Besides validators, I'm aware
> of various Tidy implementations and TagSoup (a markup
>>> cleanup engine).
>
> The tools need to be standard and compatible.

I can't follow this. In what sense? Tidy is Tidy. AWPS authors can
incorporate it into their product. What standard or compatibility plays a
role here?

[...]

>>> HTML 5 can include an ESP engine spec;
>
> ESP engine spec?

The "ESP engine" is that part of the browser that guesses what authors might
have meant when the parser runs into crap posing as HTML.


-- 
Sander Tekelenburg, <http://www.euronet.nl/~tekelenb/>