Re: WYSIWYG content development (was Re: Rethinking Brands)

Dear Community,

Sorry for joining in this discussion so late. There are a couple of
issues in this recent discussion that have come up before but I wasn't
able to devote much time to Wikibooks at the time.

On Mon, May 14, 2007 at 04:16:12PM -0600, Robert Horning wrote:
> > Currently, one fo the weaknesses of Wikibooks in regard to K-12  
> > textbook production is lack of a seamless way to get all WYSIWYG to  
> > print, and garnering a focus on one project, to prove it can be done.
> 
> I would have to agree that this is a weakness of Wikibooks, even though 
> some efforts along those lines have been done using PDF files to try and 
> make up for some of the short comings of the wiki markup syntax.  Part 
> of the problem here is that HTML was never intended to be a WYSIWYG 
> markup language, and the Wiki environment suffers from the same 
> shortcomings in this regard.

I have to admit that I don't quite understand the above use of the
term WYSIWYG;
  <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WYSIWYG>
I was under the impression that WYSIWYG is a property of the software,
not the markup language. You can type HTML markup with a text editor,
or use a WYSIWYG editor to create it from your What-You-See layout.

HTML, being a markup language, defines the structure of the document.
Definitions of how the document was supposed to display (colour,
fonts, positioning etc.) crept in over time for the lack of a better
alternative.

CSS changed that. The W3C split the markup and style up into (X)HTML
and CSS, respectively. The latter defines how the structured elements
are to be displayed. With CSS, one can control what a document is
supposed to display as. As long as users have a CSS compliant browser,
you can be confident that What-You've-Got-Is-What-They-See.

CSS supports media specific style-sheets
  <http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS2/media.html>
that allows for a different stylesheet to be used for printing (and a
number of other ones). Opera and Firefox both support these. I don't
think IE6 does and have no idea about IE7.

Instead of going through too much pain developing a tool to convert
MW-markup into LaTeX, why don't we just see if modifying the printing
style-sheet is sufficient for our needs?

Sincerely,
Martin Swift

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