RE: Why WYSIWYG for XML???

["Laurel Hickey" <lhickey -at- 2morrow -dot- bc -dot- ca>]

Hi Mark

I think what we have is a simple conceptual difference. When I say
WYSIWYG, in no way am I saying that this is only what some end user is
going to see. Perhaps a better term is WIWIWIWRNAIAUT,EON (what I see is
what I want right now as I'm a user too, end or not). Or maybe not ;-)
At any rate, I've only ever seen it used as one end of a dichotomy:
markup and WYSIWYG (of varying degrees). Perhaps using 'graphical'
sidesteps the issue if you really insist on WYSIWYG as being the 'final'
look. However, when I think 'graphical' I always think of the gui, not
the content. 

AT any rate, WYSIWYG is not what is promised by the name ...and nobody
reponsible for print material really expects it is ...I've white
knuckled enough bluelines to know that... although InDesign and
press-ready pdfs have helped. And nobody reponsible for web publishing
expects WYSIWYG either (how many browsers? how many variables?)... it's
much worse than for print work where at least everyone in the production
sequence is at least trying. 

And most the HTML I produce in Dreamweaver doesn't actually stop there
(and certainly didn't start there). The styles are used to break up the
main div "containers" (and I clean the code) for populating various
database tables for website delivery. What style sheet(s) are attached
to the php template pages depends on various factors as that kind of
information is easily delivered in a mulitude of ways and bits. We use
standard HTML styles (for graceful degrading) with custom styles that
have their beginning in Word but are defined only in the css. And yes,
styles for different types of content may 'look' identical to each other
in the Word doc, in the pdfs and in the final webpages ... but during
the process, it helps to have them look different as they are different
(for example, with one client's stuff, for each paper, the author name,
affiliation, and address all look the same but each have their own
style... for the obvious reasons, even if they never got out of Word).

I've only done a miniscule amount of XML... mostly out of curiosity and
that it can be used as a datasource for serving php webpages. I settled
on mySQL instead as I could use phpMyAdmin, a .... graphical interface
...which I hadn't found for XML ... although this was some time ago. 

Being naturally lazy ... errr... economical with my time ... I really
like the idea of being able to grab what information I need out of a
larger body of work and have it display the way I want it to ... on
screen, for various types of printing... 

At any rate, this has inspired me to dust off my XML books and see what
I'm missing... IF I can find an WYSIWYG editor! (yeah well, I expect
none of us here have survived the rate of change we face without being
somewhat obsessive!)

:-)
Laurel

-------------------------------------
Laurel Hickey
2morrow writing & document design
lhickey -at- 2morrow -dot- bc -dot- ca
http://www.2morrow.bc.ca

You may be confusing WYSIWYG with graphical displays in general. You can
certainly help the lucidity of an authoring interface by making the
different content catagories visually distinct. But this is precisely
what WYSIWYG does not do well. Different catagories of content are often
formatted identically in the final document. 




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