Re: a beginner's html-editor?

[Gerry Bourguignon <GBourgui -at- LAVASYS -dot- COM>]

Before getting into tech writing, I delivered SGML classes for a few years.
My employer was an SGML software vendor, so of course I used their SGML
editing tool in the classroom.  I always made certain that the students
understood that SGML authoring was not tied to any particular tool, and that
you could create perfectly good SGML in a text editor.  However, when they
put together a fairly complex table with the editor and then viewed the
'code', they were usually quite glad that they weren't 'forced' to use a
text editor!

I think that a combination of wysiwyg editors and text editors should be
used to teach HTML editing (or any other markup language for that matter),
and that creating a simple 'tagged' document in Notepad, for example, is a
useful exercise.

--
Gerry Bourguignon
Lone Technical Writer
Open Text Corp, LAVA Div.
Toronto, Ontario, Canada

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Jerry Kenney [SMTP:gmkenney -at- MINDSPRING -dot- COM]
> Sent: Monday, February 08, 1999 12:08 PM
> To:   TECHWR-L -at- LISTSERV -dot- OKSTATE -dot- EDU
> Subject:      Re: a beginner's html-editor?
>
> AlQuin wrote:
>
> > I am teaching web-editing courses and need some advice on a simple easy,
> > cheap and wysiwyg html-editor for both windows and macintosh platforms.
>
> I know you asked for an off line comment, but I see a larger question
> here. And
> that is why teach web editing with a wysiwyg authoring tool.
>
> HTML is not that complex that it requires an intermediary, especially in a
> learning situation.  Most GUI tools are self instructional, so learners
> ought
> to be free to make their own preferences when the time comes. But for
> learning
> purposes, I can see no better experience for finding out what calls a
> hypertext
> page makes on network resources than by writing out the tags and commands
> in
> text.
>
> Other thoughts?
>
> Jerry
>

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