Date: Fri, 20 Sep 1996 11:50:53 -0500 (EST) From: John Fieber <jfieber@indiana.edu> To: Sean Kelly <kelly@fsl.noaa.gov> Cc: darrend@novell.com, doc@FreeBSD.org Subject: Re: What tool to use to generate SGML? - Reply Message-ID: <Pine.BSI.3.95.960920111601.28904M-100000@fallout.campusview.indiana.edu> In-Reply-To: <199609201502.PAA14743@gatekeeper.fsl.noaa.gov>
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On Fri, 20 Sep 1996, Sean Kelly wrote: > >>>>> Darren Davis <darrend@novell.com> writes: > > > but was hoping for something a little more like a freeware Frame. > > Frame? You mean WYSIWYG? Isn't that against the whole point of > SGML---separation of content from formatting? Yes and no. Generally speaking, WYSIWYG SGML is an oxymoron. However, there are certainly situations where some approximation of an output format can be useful. Something like how WordPerfect works with a main editing window and a "reveal codes" window. Your SGML tags would appear in the "reveal codes" window if you wanted to see them, and the top display would be driven by a fairly simple tag->rendinging table (eg "<heading> == [Bold]"). For DTDs such as linuxdoc that are clearly targeted at paper documentation, this approach would work quite well. Of course, you would have to create the mapping for the DTD, but you only have to do it once per DTD. The purpose is not necessarly a literal reperesentation of the final product, but an approximation to make editing easier. There are good reasons that headings are formatted differently than running text in printed document: they make identifying the document structure and reading easier. Why should this benefit be extended only to the reader and not the author? The fundamantal problem I see is that it could make the rather large mental jump from presentation markup to content markup even harder. This is my main beef with HTML editors like Navigator Gold. On the one hand, real-time rendering in the editor makes editing a joy, but I'm irked to no end by how they invariably hide HTML's descriptive markup behind a procedural markup mask. Progress goes splat. (The rotting tag salad that Navigator Gold and other editors generate is yet another issue). I've been incubating ideas for a WYSIWYN (What You See is What You Need) editor for structured documents (like SGML). WYSIWYG is good for formatting tasks, but given the large difference between screen and print quality, it is counterproductive for editing content. Unfortunately, the only choice for people who don't buy into WYSIWYG for editing is to return to text editors that are still basically the same as they were when screen editing was born. Instead, we need to go the other way, beyond WYSIWYG. The first evidence of this is programming editors that are "language smart" and can highlight and manipulate grammatical units in whatever language (C, Perl, etc.). I want to expand this WYSIWYN notion to broader editing tasks and SGML editing seems an ideal target. (There is also the problem of figuring out how to formulate this into a problem I could use for my dissertation...) -john == jfieber@indiana.edu =========================================== == http://fallout.campusview.indiana.edu/~jfieber ================
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