WARNING TO ALL POSTERS PLEASE READ

[Robert Maxey <Bob_Maxey -at- MTN -dot- 3COM -dot- COM>]

--"Steven J. Owens" <puff -dot-  -at- NETCOM -dot- COM> wrote:
>
> Robert Maxey writes:
>
> > >I'm sure that's the cause of all trouble: Microsoft Frontpage, the
> > >garbaging editor...
> > >You can compose nice-looking pages with it, but this editor does
> > >definitely not follow the recognized HTML standards for
compatible use;
> > >the main concern for tech-writing.
> >
> > What standard does FP not follow?
>
>      What standard *does* it follow? :-)
>
>      Seriously, though, FP does not follow standard practice in how it
> uses HTML and how it lays out pages.  HTML is a language that, like
> English, can be used to express the same thing in different ways.
> Front Page seems to find the most awkward way to express such things.
> Part of this is that Front Page tries to map Word's internal tag
> format to HTML, which is definitely not a one-to-one mapping.  The
> rest of it seems to be simply Microsoft attitude.
>
> Steven J. Owens
> puff -at- netcom -dot- com
>
>
>


Hey Everyone.... The above was cut and pasted from a reply to the post
about Front Page and its problems, real and imagined. If you will notice,
the second line of type says "Robert Maxey writes..." I AM ROBERT MAXEY AND
I DID NOT write the quote that was attributed to me. It looks like I did.
The only part of the above that was mine was  "What standard does FP not
follow".

Please, in these complicated replies composed of parts of this quote from
that person and part of that reply from the other person, all cut and
pasted together to give the reader the impression someone says something
they did not really say, we need to use caution.

Please read and quote with care. We are supposed to be Technical
Communicators and we need to be accurate. The innocent can be hurt, and we
need to be smarter.

As for FP and its problems real and imagined, FP follows HTML. Very little
of the code FP creates is not to the current standards. A Tag is a Tag,
Indent is Indent and on and on.

The "problem" with FP and some other editors is that they sometimes
implement things many browsers do not yet support. FP uses HTML, plain and
simple. I think if you are doing a web page, you need to forget the editor
and learn the code. Then you can fix the problems.

I have at least 4 different editors and a variety of upgrades to each. All
do something different, and the code looks different on the surface. Also
please remember that there are two main browsers out there and different
versions of each. If you create a page with Visual Cafe (Symantec) and use
all the cool bells and whistles, the end result will look terrible on most
browsers other than those at 4.0 or better. More than once, I have seen
pages that looked good to the developer but terrible to me because of the
browser.

Eventually, I can widely implement Visual Cafe and use the features that I
like, but things will evolve and I will have new editors with new features
that I can't use because not all the future browsers will implement the
even cooler features. And this will always happen..

Sorry for all the Hot Air

Bob Maxey
Technical Trainer, 3Com Corporation


 From ??? -at- ??? Sun Jan 00 00:00:00 0000=