>
>That's absolutely right. I humbly submit that those of you
>who produce and support authoring software for the Web will
>do right by your customers if you inform them of this
>difference, and do your best to explain that What They See
>isn't necessarily What Everyone Else Will Get. Similarly,
>use of Netscape tags should be accompanied with the warning
>that not many browsers presently support the use of these
>tags, and not many browsers are likely to in the future.
We definatelly will, but let me suggest that it is a difficult issue. Its
pretty hard for us to even explain the issue to our sales & tech support
staff, not to mention train customers. I think this may be because that in
non-computer tools that are few situations (That I can think of) where you
make something that can turn out so different that you expect. I guess one
of the closest examples is photography, but I have sure seen many rolls full
of blurry, poorly exposed, etc, pictures, taken by people who assume that
what you shoot is what you get. In fact, if you look at the camera industry
notice the popularity off "one touch" cameras. Sure, there will always be
the pros who want all the explicit controls. Also, not the immediate
popularity of the fax machine. It is a pretty good example of "what you
stick in one end is pretty much what the other guy gets", and this explains
how non-technical people immediatelly grasped its use.
>
>I have approached a few Web gadflies, including one of the
>Mcom programmers, about the possibility of writing a new
>page description language for the Web. I hope that if this
>effort gets off the ground, it will resolve these
>difficulties.
I'm interested. I would personally suggest the IETF as a place for such
work. However, I must admit that I would prefer something that combines page
description with semantic layout. Kind of like the direction that HTML is
going. I think the key issue is robust browsers. You dont need to support
the <font size=> tag. You just need to be able to ignore it and not
crash/garble the screen.
Alex Hopmann
ResNova Software, Inc.