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First, let me reiterate for those who just tuned in that I have no brief for
FrontPage (pick your versions) or any other tool. I can be accused, rightly, of
a bias in favor of W3C Standards including WAI. If you want to know what I'm
talking about, aim the browser of your choice to http://www.w3.org/ and do some
reading.
--- Dan Hall <dhall -at- san-carlos -dot- rms -dot- slb -dot- com> wrote:
> Tom writes:
>
> "I'm still waiting for someone to tell me what
> awful, terrible code (outside of a couple of meta
> tags) the current crop of WYSIWYG editors impart
> to documents."
>
> Ok Tom, I'll bite.
>
> Here's an instance - from last week.
>
> A page created using FrontPage contained 62 empty
> tags, 872 comments, and 37 redundant font tags. I'm
> not talking about a huge scroller, either. This is
> a page with about 60 lines of text, title and nav
> bars, and some number of tables and hyperlinks. We
> use three different font "styles" for body text,
> headings and subheads.
I believe you when you say you did this...I'm just not sure how you did it. I
must have something turned off, because I only get FP generated comments when I
use one of their "components" or "webbots" or whatever they call them these
days. It also sounds like you created a table with no data in the cells
(accounting for the empty tags.
Yep, FP uses font tags. Yep, I don't like 'em. Oh and that's one reason why I
use HTML-Kit (free via W3C) to automatically clean them out. I, too, am looking
for the day when FP will allow style sheets to control a document's
presentation instead of suffering the style sheet to exist. But FP DOES suffer
the style sheet to exist and you CAN even get styles from a document's drop
down menu. But then you'd have to study the tool.
> 872 comments? For the majority of users who are
> currently using dial-up, the removal of 872 comments,
> with an average length of 24 characters, is a real
> time-saver.
You are absolutely right. I'm unclear how you got all those comments. Are you
invoking webbots? If so, you can steal the code and get rid of the bot and
clean those comments out. (But I'm guessing you want the ease of creating
whatever it is that the webbot gives you. That's a choice. Here we clean 'em up
or live with 'em if we have to.)
> Another example - unordered lists. FP provides
> bullets for unordered lists, and supports nested
> ul's. The "source" window (the biggest joke since
> master documents in Word) shows ul tags. But the
> actual HTML is a table with gifs for the bullets.
Yeah, if you use the graphic bullets you create a lot of extra overhead for
yourself. Been there and done that. OTOH, it is my experience that adding
graphics to bulleted lists just creates a bunch of overhead for the users
anyway. Go back to your comment about the 872 comments. If it is your opinion
that those comments significantly slow down the loading of your page over a
dialup connection, why in the world would you deliberately add graphics
downloads to your bulleted list? I learned to use the list items in the drop
down and not use that graphics feature (which, by the way, also creates a table
to display those fancy bullets, which in my opinion you don't need anyway).
I not only didn't like how FP did that, I couldn't think of either a way to do
it cleaner or a reason to add so much graphic loading to the page over and
above what was needed to convey content. But you can blame the tool for that
presentation choice if you want to.
> FrontPage is broken. Like Word. Can I use it? Yep.
> Do I? When required. Do I defend the stupidity
> behind its design? Nope. Neither should anyone
> else (IMO).
Nah, FrontPage is broken differently from how Word is broken. <g> I'm not the
brightest bulb in the box, but I've figured out how to live with the tools
they've given me here, and we're all Microsoft all the time. That's life. I can
use all the free stuff I want, and I use both HTML-Kit and Bobbie to make sure
my output is compatible with standards and viewable by a lot of browsers.
=====
Tom Murrell
Lead Technical Writer
Alliance Data Systems
Columbus, Ohio mailto:tmurrell -at- columbus -dot- rr -dot- com
Personal Web Page - http://home.columbus.rr.com/murrell/
Page Last Updated 07/15/01
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