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Subject: Re: DOCBOOK-APPS: Questions Concerning Style Sheets
Nothing like a good religious debate ;) >>>>> "M" == Matthew Harrison <harry@inpharmatica.co.uk> writes: M> I only partly agree. Presentation helps people understand the M> content and structure of a document. Why can't the writer have M> the benefits of presentation as they write? What you see is M> what you mean. Spoken like a true child of print media. I know at least two large web content shops who approve their content designs based on a blow-up poster of a colour laser print set before a conference table. As a result, they produce beautiful content ... but ugly and useless when seen on a monitor, and they then stand around and wonder why they are not a top-rated site. They look at Yahoo and wonder why such an ugly site is so popular. What they see may be what _they_ mean, but what is seen is not what they meant. M> Commercial tools like XmetalPro give you views M> of the XML, and the processed version at the same M> time. XML/SGML is a good for a file format, but the markup can M> be very intrusive when all you have is a text-editor. Even in M> emacs with syntax colouring, it can be hard to see the wood for M> the markup, er I mean trees. Agreed ... until you flip the switch to hide the markup. Then you have an ascii representation showing all the proper structure, which is admittedly in need of a measure of imagination to map colours to meanings and some fixing to the indents, but no more confusing than if you look at a GUI-rendered page set by the recommended style-guide of the world's largest trade publisher and see that source code, functions, variables and screendumps are _all_ courier bold 10pt. As a sidebar, I have recently been reworking some of my writings done in that old GUI template method, and I have been shocked and appauled to see the _large_ number of errors introduced by the copy editors and subsequently missed during my proofreading. In having to conceptually re-tag everything, I find, for example, commands that should have been filenames, filenames and URLs with extraneous periods (sentence ends in a filename), and punctuation, capitalization and hyphenation by language rules being imposed on critical filenames. Had this been in DocBook, even copy editors would have trouble making these mistakes. When I last worked in WordPerfect (c.1985), I remember having to toggle "Show tags" more than once per session, and I find, for example, the WYSIAYG Netscape Composer is useless for serious webpage work because I waste substantial precious time trying to guess the hidden markup. It is far faster to write if (a) I have hotkeys and templates for frequent markup patterns and (b) I can _see_ what I am writing _as_ _it_ _is_, not as some robot _thinks_ it is. I will admit, if I had the time, I would customize Emacs PSGML mode to use different fontfaces instead of just different colours, and I would like to see the text contained within certain tags to be rendered differently when I hide the tags. If I had the time, I'd fix TkSGML (except the authors don't trust me and keep their sources closed) but I haven't the time for either, so I'm stuck with PSGML mode and my imagination. -- Gary Lawrence Murphy <garym@teledyn.com> TeleDynamics Communications Inc Business Innovations Through Open Source Systems: http://www.teledyn.com "Computers are useless. They can only give you answers."(Pablo Picasso)
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