Web Design: Would you design a PDF by writing Postscript in Notepad?

F

fgdg

Why do we put up with web design software? Nobody makes a PDFs by
writing Postscript in Notepad, but that is what designer's working for
the web are expected to do. That is how far web design has come.
Postscript is a page description language like HTML or CSS. By now we
should have a Quark Xpress or Indesign for the web, but the only
morsel the software industry has thrown designers after a decade of
the web is CSS coding and a choice of Georgia or verdana. It's beyond
the joke.
 
T

TaliesinSoft

Why do we put up with web design software? Nobody makes a PDFs by
writing Postscript in Notepad, but that is what designer's working for
the web are expected to do. That is how far web design has come.
Postscript is a page description language like HTML or CSS. By now we
should have a Quark Xpress or Indesign for the web, but the only
morsel the software industry has thrown designers after a decade of
the web is CSS coding and a choice of Georgia or verdana. It's beyond
the joke.

There is indeed software, available now for the Macintosh, that allows one to
construct a website using WYSIWYG methods and with no requirement that the
user should have any knowledge of such as HTML. That software is Freeway
Express and Freeway Pro. Freeway works much like InDesign in that the website
author concentrates on appearance and action and not upon the underlying code
that makes things happen. As an aside, the resulting HTML of a Freeway
generated website is quite good, usually passing the strictest of code
verification.
 
B

Benjamin Niemann

fgdg said:
Why do we put up with web design software? Nobody makes a PDFs by
writing Postscript in Notepad, but that is what designer's working for
the web are expected to do. That is how far web design has come.
Postscript is a page description language like HTML or CSS.

There's a fundamental difference between PS/PDF and HTML+CSS. PS/PDF are
exact (as far as possible) representations of a printed - and thus fixed -
document. In this context WYSIWYG makes sense - pretty much indeed.

But the HTML+CSS combo has to deal with different user-agents,
screen-/fontsizes, user stylesheets and a gazillion of other factors that
influence how a document is seen/heard/felt by a user. And this is an
advancement over printed media.
Applying WYSIWYG to web-documents just creates the *illusion* of simplicity,
moves the focus to presentational details while hiding semantics. This
reduces HTML+CSS to a bad PDF replacement.
 
E

Ed Seedhouse

Why do we put up with web design software? Nobody makes a PDFs by
writing Postscript in Notepad, but that is what designer's working for
the web are expected to do.

That's because the web is not paper. PDFs are a medium designed to be
printed on paper. The Web isn't. There is no useable "wysiwyg" editor
for the web because there is no one "wyg".
That is how far web design has come.
Postscript is a page description language like HTML

HTML is *not* a page description language. It is a *document*
description language and that's entirely different. More generalized.
It's beyond the joke.

The joke is on you because you don't understand the media. TV is not
Radio and the Web is not paper, and never will be. You are like a Radio
producer moaning that your TV programs won't work properly when you use
your well understood radio methods.
 
A

Andy Dingley

That software is Freeway Express and Freeway Pro.

Nicely standards-compliant, it has to be said. However "layout" relies
on a massive over-dependence on CSS absolute positioning, and with
pixel units at that. To quote Computer Arts mag, "creating
proportional rather than fixed-width layouts is almost impossible".

Freeway Pro is a competently implemented page-layout tool using valid
HTML and CSS. For fixed-pixel layouts it's great, but as a web design
tool it misses the point entirely and cannot be recommended at all.

There's still a shortage of WYSIWYG web site design tools with any
concept of semantically-based CSS that's an overall site feature, not
just a sequence of one-off page layout tasks.
 
T

Toby A Inkster

fgdg said:
Why do we put up with web design software? Nobody makes a PDFs by
writing Postscript in Notepad, but that is what designer's working for
the web are expected to do.

You are comparing apples with oranges here. PostScript is[1] a language for
describing what pages look like. HTML is a language for describing what
pages *mean*.

People can auto-generate postscript documents from visual tools and the
generating process will accurately create a document conveying the user's
intentions.

When people auto-generate HTML documents from visual tools, the tool needs
to guess what the user really meant. Is does this text begin a new
paragraph (<p>), or is it really just two line breaks (<br><br>)? This
series of several short lines, should it be marked up as a bullet-less
list? Do these italics signify a citation (<cite>), some emphasis (<em>),
or a Latin phrase (<i lang="la">)? Is that a single-line paragraph of bold
text (<p><b>) or should it really be a third-level heading (<h3>)?

There are, as I see it, three solutions to this conundrum:

1. To hell with semantics! Forget <em>, <cite> and so on, just
use <i> all the time!
2. Write a tool that's really, really good at guessing
semantics.
3. Write a tool that doesn't have buttons and short-cut keys
for things like bold, italic, different colours and fonts
and so forth, but has buttons to insert citations, quotes,
diagrammes and so forth, has options to mark certain chunks
of text as either more or less important than the rest.

Most recent visual HTML editors use the first approach, creating
semantic-free documents. In my opinion authors using this sort of
tool have no business writing HTML at all. If all they care about is
the visual appearance of the document, they should probably switch
to publishing in Flash, which is far more suited to their ideas.

The second solution has been attempted once or twice, but tends to get
things wrong as often as it gets them right.

The third solution is a good idea, but using the current attempts at
this sort of tool tends to be no easier to use than typing the HTML
by hand anyway, rendering them rather useless.

As an aside, some people *do* write postscript by hand. And whatsmore,
this usually results in much smaller files, which load much more quickly.

____
1. PostScript is actually a fully-fledged scripting language, but it's
commonly used as a page description language and as a transmission format
for print jobs.

--
Toby A Inkster BSc (Hons) ARCS
Contact Me ~ http://tobyinkster.co.uk/contact
Geek of ~ HTML/SQL/Perl/PHP/Python*/Apache/Linux

* = I'm getting there!
 
H

Harlan Messinger

fgdg said:
Why do we put up with web design software? Nobody makes a PDFs by
writing Postscript in Notepad, but that is what designer's working for
the web are expected to do. That is how far web design has come.
Postscript is a page description language like HTML or CSS.

Postscript is a page *format* description language. HTML is a page
*structure* description language.
 
H

Harlan Messinger

Harlan said:
Postscript is a page *format* description language. HTML is a page
*structure* description language.

Also, CSS *can* be applied like PostScript, including a STYLE attribute
with every tag to define that element's appearance alone, and in that
case a CSS editor can apply the styles that will make an element look
exactly has you defined its appearance using WYSIWYG tools. But CSS is
best used to define entire style sets based on element tags, classes,
and IDs. It's hard to use CSS in that manner when applying formatting to
individual page elements one at a time with a WYSIWYG editor.
 
D

dorayme

"fgdg said:
Why do we put up with web design software? Nobody makes a PDFs by
writing Postscript in Notepad, but that is what designer's working for
the web are expected to do. That is how far web design has come.
Postscript is a page description language like HTML or CSS. By now we
should have a Quark Xpress or Indesign for the web, but the only
morsel the software industry has thrown designers after a decade of
the web is CSS coding and a choice of Georgia or verdana. It's beyond
the joke.

You have some things wrong. You surely must have heard of
Microsoft Frontpage and Microsoft Publisher and seen the web
export or 'save as' features in just about every modern word
processor and image software package. And then, of course, there
is Dreamweaver. In other words, there _is_ more than notepad.

And there is an implication in what you are saying that the false
(see above) situation you paint is for lack of trying. Not so.
You might be very surprised to learn of the considerable efforts
teams of clever people have made to improve the situation but
without the success you would be wanting. This should suggest
that what is being attempted here is orders of magnitude harder
than you imagine.

To put it simply, it is very hard indeed to design machinary to
deliver content in a reasonably effective and where possible
elegant way to all the devices that are made to receive such
content from the internet. It still requires educated earthlings
to do it well. Some of these WSIWIG programs can save website
makers who have mastered the software some time but in the end
this is because they know how to get by without it, they know the
limitations of such software and can compensate for it.
 
D

dorayme

TaliesinSoft said:
As an aside, the resulting HTML of a Freeway
generated website is quite good, usually passing the strictest of code
verification.

If you mean validation, then this is not much evidence of
goodness...
 
T

TaliesinSoft

Freeway Pro is a competently implemented page-layout tool using valid HTML
and CSS. For fixed-pixel layouts it's great, but as a web design tool it
misses the point entirely and cannot be recommended at all.

If Freeway Express or Freeway Pro are capable of the WYSIWYG production of
webpages to the complete satisfaction of the author then how is it that "it
misses the poiint entirely?" There are undoubtedly nuances in website
creation that are not addressed by Freeway, but unless these nuances are
needed/wanted by the website author than there absence is irrelevant. It is
almost like saying that a piano is a musical instrument that can't be
recommended at all because it can't produce a continuous slide through the
scale as can a violin.
 
D

dorayme

TaliesinSoft said:
If Freeway Express or Freeway Pro are capable of the WYSIWYG production of
webpages to the complete satisfaction of the author then how is it that "it
misses the poiint entirely?

The author is not the one to be satisfied here. It is not his or
her needs that are paramount. It really is a fundamental mistake
to be thinking this.
 
J

Jonathan N. Little

TaliesinSoft said:
If Freeway Express or Freeway Pro are capable of the WYSIWYG production of
webpages to the complete satisfaction of the author then how is it that "it
misses the poiint entirely?" There are undoubtedly nuances in website
creation that are not addressed by Freeway, but unless these nuances are
needed/wanted by the website author than there absence is irrelevant. It is
almost like saying that a piano is a musical instrument that can't be
recommended at all because it can't produce a continuous slide through the
scale as can a violin.
Give them credit that unlike MS they actually use their software to
built their site! That said, neither impressed with the output of their
site nor their gallery of sites. Agree with Andy here....
 
B

Bergamot

dorayme said:
The author is not the one to be satisfied here.

Indeed. Too bad those who should be satisfied, i.e. the web site users,
often get the short end of the stick. :(
 
T

the red dot

fgdg said:
Why do we put up with web design software? Nobody makes a PDFs by
writing Postscript in Notepad, but that is what designer's working for
the web are expected to do. That is how far web design has come.
Postscript is a page description language like HTML or CSS. By now we
should have a Quark Xpress or Indesign for the web, but the only
morsel the software industry has thrown designers after a decade of
the web is CSS coding and a choice of Georgia or verdana. It's beyond
the joke.

which reminds me of the story of the americans who spent millions of dollars
making a pen that worked in zero gravity, the russians just used a pencil.
 
T

TaliesinSoft

[commenting on the Freeway website]
Give them credit that unlike MS they actually use their software to built
their site! That said, neither impressed with the output of their site nor
their gallery of sites. Agree with Andy here....

I find it interesting, er, uh, amusing, that Adobe, the marketers of not one,
but two high priced website development tools, GoLive and Dreamweaver,
apparently don't use either to develop their own website. So, what is it
about the Adobe website that would set it apart from the Freeway (Softpress)
website?

Incidentally, the W3C Markup Validation Service found 0 errors with the
Freeway site but 19 with the Adobe site. Oops, I forgot, validation is
apparently useless. But isn't it adherence to standards that should bring
about uniformity in presentation of a website amongst all browsers?
 
W

William Mitchell

the red dot said:
which reminds me of the story of the americans who spent millions of dollars
making a pen that worked in zero gravity, the russians just used a pencil.

My understanding is that story is apocryphal. The space pen, which
both use, was developed by a private company.

And I use a space pen, together with a waterproof pad, for taking
notes while working in the woods. It costs somewhat more, but its
well worth it.
 
D

dorayme

William Mitchell said:
And I use a space pen, together with a waterproof pad, for taking
notes while working in the woods. It costs somewhat more, but its
well worth it.

I use it to write love letters to alt.html members when going
back home for my holidays...
 
D

dorayme

TaliesinSoft said:
Oops, I forgot, validation is
apparently useless.

To point out the limitations of validators, what they can and
cannot do, what their real purpose is and what you can profitably
use them for, should not invite this reaction. It is a rather
complicated thing but basically a validator will tell you if a
document conforms in certain respects to the declared or assumed
standard for that doc in a narrow formal sense. It says nothing
about semantics, the meaningfulness, neatness, easy readability
or accessibility of your efforts, much less the quality of being
easy to upgrade. All these latter mentioned qualities are
notoriously difficult for earthling created machines to
understand. Not impossible but difficult.

Earthlings, on the other hand, are meaning machines par
excellence. That is what they are good for apart from killing.
And even then, note, earthlings have meaningful reasons to do so
(I said meaningful, not good reasons.)
 
T

TaliesinSoft

That was my not so good momentary attempt at being a bit cynical!
To point out the limitations of validators, what they can and cannot do,
what their real purpose is and what you can profitably use them for,
should not invite this reaction. It is a rather complicated thing but
basically a validator will tell you if a document conforms in certain
respects to the declared or assumed standard for that doc in a narrow
formal sense. It says nothing about semantics, the meaningfulness,
neatness, easy readability or accessibility of your efforts, much less the
quality of being easy to upgrade. All these latter mentioned qualities are
notoriously difficult for earthling created machines to understand. Not
impossible but difficult.

I'll certainly agree that validators are essentially limited to to verifying
that a site's code adheres to established rules and not on the quality and/or
neatness and such of the code. But they do provide a hint at how well the
code will process on standards conforming browsers.
 

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