Re: WWWWW Notes

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From: Bob Stayton <bobs@sco.com>
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To: Nathan.Torkington@vuw.ac.nz, www-talk@nxoc01.cern.ch
Subject: Re: WWWWW Notes
Date: Thu, 12 Aug 93 10:11:30 PDT
Message-id: <9308121011.aa13280@scotty.sco.COM>
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Status: RO

> > Authoring Tools
> > ---------------
> 
> What kind(s) of authoring tools are we looking for?  Could an idealist
> please post a list of wanted features for would-be developers to work
> with?

Here are my notes from the authoring tools discussion.  We
didn't really develop a features list. In the short time we
had, we mostly discussed what was out there and why there
wasn't more.

Authoring tools
---------------
I led this subgroup in the hope that someone would
offer their whizbang WYSIWYG HTML editor.  No luck.

- Only the NeXT box has a graphical editor, and it won't work
  with HTML+ because of element nesting.

- tkWWW is an HTML editor, but has a bad interface and is
  hard to use.  User's said vi was quicker.

- gnu emacs has an HTML editing add-on that many recommended,
  but it isn't graphical.

- Many companies keep doc in another format
  and need general conversion tools.  I mentioned
  ICA toolkit as a possibility, but the general
  experience confirms it isn't quite ready for SGML.

- SoftQuad, Arbortext, and Frame offer tools that could
  be used for authoring, but there is a need for a cheap
  and simple HTML editor.

- Word Perfect and Intellitag could work, but no one
  has experience with it.

- Word for Windows could be used with a set of HTML styles
  and use an RTF-HTML filter, but Word doesn't support
  nesting context.

- The Xmosaic display widget writer was there, and he tried
  to do an editible version.  The main barrier seems to be
  editing structured documents.  It is hard to define a good
  WYSIWYG interface for that because users aren't used to
  structure, and visual cues to indicate what element the
  cursor is in are important (but break the WYSIWYG).

- NCSA said they could add editing at a high cost, and
  no one offered to pay.

- Fantasy: one of the SGML editor vendors releases a
  cheap crippled version of their product for HTML.

bobs