Re: Thanks for your help

Bill Janssen wrote:
>  
> 
> Lee Passey <lee@novomail. net <mailto:lee%40novomail.net>> wrote:
> 
>  > My opinion is that if you want to create the best e-books possible you
>  > must learn the fundamentals of HTML. There are no shortcuts (although
>  > you don't need to become an HTML guru, with all the arcane knowledge of
>  > its quirks to be effective).
> 
> Sure there are shortcuts. Surprisingly few, but (for example) Karelia
> Software's SandVox is a very nice WYSIWYG editor for HTML. You don't
> need to know HTML at all to use it. Even OpenOffice "Writer" will
> produce reasonable HTML, with no user knowledge of HTML.

Eew, gack! I've seen the HTML that OpenOffice produces, and I can't 
imagine that it would be adequate for any purpose other than loading 
back into OpenOffice for printing. Indeed, in my experience OpenOffice 
has a bad case of PDFitis: it is completely oriented towards creating 
static, inflexible documents that can only be modified by human beings.

There's nothing wrong with using a WYSIWYG editor just so long as the 
user understands that what /he/ sees won't be what other people see, and 
if he or she is capable of adding a structure that goes beyond how to 
draw pictures of text on the screen.

> And that's as
> it should be, really; why should the author have to understand the
> markup language?

An author shouldn't have to understand a markup language, but he has to 
understand the fundamental structure of a document, and has to be able 
to encode that structure into the document. Humans are really good an 
inferring intent, but computers suck at it. If you create a document 
that consists entirely of instructions of how to draw a picture, it's 
not going to be flexible enough to adapt to the wide variety of e-book 
devices in the marketplace.

Yes, there is some effort involved for e-book creators to learn how to 
create adaptable and pleasant e-books, but I don't think that trying to 
push that difficulty back onto the consumer is the smart thing to do.


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