[DawnFalcon]

Originally Posted by frabjous

Semantics? Are you somehow suggesting that Word and InDesign are the same product with different names?

No, you're suggesting that the vast majority of people don't use WYSIWYG editors for working with day to day.

I think most authors should use WYSIWYM editors.

I strongly disagree. Only very specialist applications - and I'm talking the equivalent of brain surgery - should need to deviate one iota from WYSIWYG.

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.

Where are they? The WYWIWYG web editors, that is? Find some modern ones and you'll be right. The issue is well known.

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.)

Yes, because the standard is so hard to implement that you end up with radically different results! This is a direct strike against it. Again, pre-CSS there were some editors which gave pretty good results...

But separation of form from content is definitely not silly.

I didn't say it was. I am objecting to the implementation, not the concept. For example, you don't have to allow free editing of font size etc, but instead use a style editor...

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.

No, you just need a moderately smart parser which can handle 95% of situations sanely. The other 5% can be tweaked by a true web designer if that last 0.0001 seconds of loading speed is important.

And nuts - you can work with stylesets perfectly well in word. You can also chose not to, sure, which is messy. It's down to the GUI and how the user uses the program, and you're mixing up "sloppy" and "WYSIWYG" - when you're not using something like CSS which is very very hard to use in a WYWIWYG environment!

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

So what? The difference in 99.9% of cases, especially for simple websites, is absolutely insignificant. And you're certainly proving my point, originally made to Ahi, about TeX users being completely out of step with modern mass usage of computer programs.

But that's is not the final output--since LyX then takes the source generated in this way and optimizes the paragraph layout...

That's true WYWIWYG. Simply because it uses a parser to adjust things behind the scenes doesn't make the blindest bit of difference. Aim for a 95% "sanity rate", and you'll be doing good. Sure, it'll have slightly messy code in the 5% of cases. But that's really not critical - especially since you can run it through /several/ sanity checkers...

(But only if the standards are implemented fully, which again CSS fails hard at!)

The difference is, with a sane standard in place of CSS, people wouldn't need web designers for even the simplest web sites. And of course we can't have THAT. /Sarcasm.