[frabjous]

Originally Posted by DawnFalcon

Okay, they're using InDesign then, if you want to use semantics...

Semantics? Are you somehow suggesting that Word and InDesign are the same product with different names? Nothing could be further from the truth.

InDesign may provide a live preview, and allow a certain amount of editing through that interface, but it does more than that. It wouldn't be the standard if it were.

Same reason it's not expected that anyone who needs to change their graphics drivers would be expected to program C++. There's a good reason people use GUI's for the vast vast majority of their work.

GUIs can take many forms. That do not have to be WYSIWYG and nothing else. I use a GUI for LaTeX editing, which provides a split screen of the mark-up and a preview of the result.

I'm not even suggesting that for regular authors. I haven't been claiming much of anything about what authors should use, but rather about what publishers should use. I think most authors should use WYSIWYM editors.

Quasi? No, WYSIWYG period.

My goodness! Read what you respond to. I explained why the concept of true WYSIWYG makes no sense in this context. If I am mistaken somehow, you need to explain how.

And there were such editors coming along very well before CSS, but they were more or less deliberately killed off in the CSS era because it was near-impossible to manage them.

That's just what you said before, and provided no evidence for.

Please give one example of one way in which CSS interferes with the kind of "WYSIWYG" (notice the scare quotes) editor you have in mind.

Unfortunately, it doesn't, which is why most websites still ARE made with WYSIWYG, which results in a glut of messy mark-up, and greatly complicates a number of tasks.

Forcing people into a few set packages rather than letting them lay out a simple website in a WYSIWYG editor is silly.

There is no such thing as a true WYSIWYG editor for websites. (Even if there were something close, the differences in browsers would cause trouble.)

But separation of form from content is definitely not silly. It is perhaps THE most essential thing for the possibility of distributing the same content across a variety of different media. It is also very important for proper textual analysis, searchability, and lots of other tasks to which text is put.

Suppose I want to count how many times italics are used in a certain document. If the document is properly made with mark-up, this can be done in seconds. If it was made by WYSIWYG, then the clicking habits of the user will affect how the tags inside are distributed.

WYSIWYG editors encourage people to put in manual line breaks or page breaks that only work well for their display. It encourages people not to think in terms of rules or semantic categories (e.g., this is a chapter title, this is a subsection title, this is a display, this is a citation, this is a comment), but in terms of individual parts of individual documents, and thus to inconsistencies.

WYSIWYG-produced material is also inefficient in file size, and in a variety of other ways.

But certainly you could have quasi WYSIWYG editors -- and they could provide a lot more options than you seem to think. Consider, e.g., a product like LyX. While you're working on, italics looks like italics and bold looks like bold, and equations looks like they're supposed, and tables look like tables. But that's is not the final output--since LyX then takes the source generated in this way and optimizes the paragraph layout and adds fine typographical features like kerning and ligatures and hyphenation, which would be impractical in the editor display.

Tools like that could be standard for authors. Actual publishers could and should have a variety of tools.

Originally Posted by pdurrant

I don't know about MathML, but ADE does support SVG. I have an ePub that has a title page in SVG that works OK with ADE.

That's what I wrote in the paragraph above the one you quote!