Re: HTML table model suggestion

lilley (lilley@afs.mcc.ac.uk)
Mon, 3 Apr 95 12:21:20 EDT

Daniel Glazman wrote:

> In message <199503301033.AA106369628@dragget.hpl.hp.com> 30 Mar 95
05:35:45, dsr@hplb.hpl.hp.com wrote:

> > Given, that the philosophy of HTML is to keep it simple, and that
> > significant numbers of people will want to continue to edit HTML
> > directly, why should we complicate HTML for the sake of minor
> > simplifications to CALS filters?

> People editing HTML won't see tags, won't see the DTD, won't
> need any HTML knowledge in a *very* close future. A good SGML editor
> is able to remove all technical stuff from users'view providing
> a Wysiwyg cosy environment. "Directly" will mean using a software
> like W3C's or SGI's editor...

This is certainly possible; whether it will be universal is a different
matter. Should we make it impossible to edit HTML 3.0 by hand? I think
this would be unwise for 3.0.

Once there are free, robust editing applications on all major platforms
available for ftp, then ignoring hand markup becomes justifiable. This
may well be the situation once 3.0 comes out, if it takes a long time!

I see though that tables are proposed for 2.1 which is an evolutionary
updating of 2.0

> People using SMTP, RFC822 and MIME do not all know the
> relevant RFCs nor compose they message headers with emacs,
> do they ?

A nice example. I am currently looking at Zmail to see if paying
substantial amounts of money per seat can be justified. An at the
moment, yes, I use emacs to compose MIME messagesbecause the elm +
metamail combo privides minimal composition help for MIME messages.
Sometimes this requires hacking a mail header.

In summary, I see Daniel's point but do not think we have enough
infrastructure yet to jetisson the possibility of manual editing.

--
Chris Lilley
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