I have long pondered the availability of HTML authoring
tools to speed the proliferation of WWW served data. My
organization is largely a PC/Windows based one (unfortunatly),
therefor a tool for that environment is desireable. I read
Chuck Suttons's previous message about W4W/RTF conversion
to HTLM with great interest. A read of his code, and test
drive of his products, caused me to rethink the approach. As a
result I've had one of my students take Chuck's initial idea
and try to take it furthur, but without any C-code external
to W4W. We have had a surprising degree of success in
achieving our goals with W4W style sheets and macros alone.
In essence, we have defined a W4W style to mechanize
structuring HTML documents and then a macro to create an
export filter which produces the HTML. We accomodate
embedded (invisible) URLs and "hot words" to give the
appearance of making W4W into a WYSIWYG HTML Authoring tool.
Much work and experimentation is still needed, but I wanted
to let you'se guys know we were pushing this front, And to
solicit input of ideas, effort, or other useful things. One
of the thinks we'de like to do in the future is to have but
a single tool be our authoring and viewing tool, and also our
general word processing program. It would also be nice if this
tool could read in the HTML+ DTD to remain current without
reprogramming the macros for each change. This may be a tall
order given my uncertainty of tbd changes in HTML+ and given
how long we've been using W4W around here.
<P.LISTER@mail.cranfield.ac.uk>
> n.b. Its going to be much much easier writing documents in HTML+ than
> with MS Word and having to fight styles, fonts and pagination
etc. :-)
>I think I have to disagree with you there, Dave. Try telling that to
>the MS Word fans here. MS Word (and Interleaf, PageMaker, WordPerfect)
>are a helluva sight easier to write in than a text editor, even with
>Marc A's excellent GNU mode to help.
>What I (and I think you) really want are output filters for the like of
>MS Word (and/or RTF) that produces HTML(+) to make PUBLISHING it
>easier. I had a desperate try a few months ago, and the results were
>fairly horrible (I tried to use DEC's RTF and SGML CDA converters).
>While we're on the subject (again) I repeat my cry; has anyone written
>such a filter yet? I'd have a go if I had the time and even the
>faintest understanding of RTF.
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Jeffrey L. Grover voice: (404)894-8961
Ga Tech/GTRI/CSITL fax: (404)894-9081
347 Ferst Dr. N.W. noman@gatech.edu
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