[whatwg] several messages about HTML5

[James Graham]

Lachlan Hunt wrote:
> It's not so much a flaw in HTML's design, as it is the refusal of 
> popular WYSIWYG editor vendors to replace common presentational UIs, 
> such as font styles and colours, with much more useful semantic UIs.  I 
> don't believe it's particularly difficult to achieve.

The difficult problem is not to produce an editor that encourages the 
use of semantic markup, it is to produce an editor that encourages the 
use of semantic markup and would be chosen in preference to e.g. MS 
Frontpage or Dreamweaver by the typical WYSIWYG user. To me it seems 
likely that this problem is intrinsically hard as you must squeeze the 
/more/ information out of the /same/ amount of mental effort on the part 
of the user. Obviously I would love to be proven wrong but given the 
limited success in this field in the last decade, I'm not holding my breath.

-- 
"The universe doesn't care what you believe. The wonderful thing about 
science is that it doesn't ask for your faith, it just asks for your 
eyes" --- http://xkcd.com/c154.html