[whatwg] <font> (was Support Existing Content)

[Adrian Sutton]

On 2/5/07 11:40 AM, "Jon Barnett" <jonbarnett at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Embedded and inline editors would include the textarea tag, which is clearly
>> not WYSIWYG for HTML (but is for plain text) so both are poor terms.
> 
> Embedded, inline editors would include "contenteditable" areas and documents
> with "designMode" on, like the box I'm typing in right now in Gmail.

As would WYSIWYG, and that's a good thing. Textarea however would be
excluded from WYSIWYG but included in embedded, inline editors. My point was
that there are multiple classes of software which can be embedded or inlined
into a HTML page and provide a means to edit HTML content. The term embedded
or inline is thus not specific enough to describe the class of software that
attempts to make HTML editing WYSIWYG (eg: EditLive!, TinyMCE, FCKEditor
etc).    

> I think better solutions are coming along for the case of converting an HTML
> document to PDF in all its graphical glory on a server without X Window, etc.
> (e.g. a way of using Gecko to do the work without opening a window.)  I don't
> think it's necessary to cater to these systems by allowing presentational
> markup. 

With a choice between <font face="Arial"> and <span style="font-family:
Arial"> I'd be happy to cater to them, however given that the current spec
would still require the span tag version it's entirely pointless.

The real issue here is that a very significant number of authors want to be
able to say "make this bit of text Arial, 18pt" and the HTML spec doesn't
want them to do that (for good reason). If we must have users saying doing
things like that I'd prefer that the HTML markup essentially said "the
author specifically asked for this content to be a different font" rather
than "this text is somehow special" (which is my take on what span means).

That said, by default our editor outputs the span tag version because we
like to follow standards and I recommend using our styles menu to apply CSS
classes and appropriate structural markup (headings etc). We did however
have to go back and add an option to output font tags because of user
complaints.

Regards,

Adrian Sutton.
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