Re: HTML

[OkAnnie@xxxxxxxx]

:   Annie Fisher quoted me as saying "Its : the WYSIWYG
capabilities that I find :  appealing of XyWin+HTML." That was not
 :  my comment, I was repeating it.

Kenneth Frank: Apologies for my carelessness.

:   I have reviewed a lot of traffic on :  CompuServe and
elsewhere regarding : HTML editing products, and WYSIWYG :   is a
constant theme of a lot of people.

Well, I may pass that along to a friend, a longtime CIS customer
who laughs about his fellow customers' fear and ignorance of the
'net. A Web author can't designate even so much as a serif or
sans-serif face; the user controls that. Type sizes are relative
and also user-controlled. There's simply no way to predict how
someone reading a page will have his browser configured. HTML
formatting codes are deliberately crude. Must drive Mac design
tyrants up the wall. As the Warpies are fond of saying, it's a
new paradigm. The challenge is to construct a page that will look
decent in any browser with any user's unpredictable type
preference settings.

:   [ ... ] users would be able to set up : multiple display
parameters to conform to :  the characteristics of various
browsers. [ ... ]

Yesss! Delighted to read that. While WYSIWIG is unattainable, a
viewer that emulates popular browsers sounds realistic. At least
an author could experiment with the various preferences users
might set with various browsers. Marketed properly, it would be
hot now. Next year? Who knows?

:   Also, there seems to be a consensus that :   none of the
current crop of products is :   particularly good.

Why am I not surprised? As soon as I see that a job can be
ascii-coded I assume that xyWrite will be the best tool, so I've
never downloaded an html editor. I use html.kbd with xyWrite
running as a dos app under Windows, html.pr3 prints coded files
to disk, and I taskswitch to offline Netscape as a viewer. Not
yet optimal, but at least xyWrite gives me elbow room. I hope
mode concatenation will refine my html.pr--and that TTG moves
fast.    --Annie

========================== annie fisher  nyc