[whatwg] Authoring Re: several messages about HTML5

[Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis]

Dave Raggett wrote:
> I am therefore devoting a lot of my time into developing a 
> new kind of authoring environment that combines a semantic view with 
> a wysiwyg view, and which will use dictionaries to generate the 
> markup that few of us can be bothered to write directly.

This project sounds very interesting, although I'm a bit dubious about
the benefit of a single WYSIWYG view rather than a series of views
presenting how a given document skin would look in different devices
(e.g. mobile view, screen reader view, console view, magnifier view,
desktop view). This would help with the problem Chaals mentioned of
people continuing to view the web as essentially a visual medium. Is
this project of yours a public project? Are there more details about
what you're trying to do somewhere?

Perhaps the best metaphor for the separation of content and styles is
"skinning" or "theming", a concept almost as popularly familiar as
WYSIWIG itself.

> Authoring tools need to respect this separation of roles and avoid
> burdening people with tasks that are inappropriate to their roles.

Yes I suspect moving away from single view to workflow models would help
here.

--
Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis