Re: More thoughts

Tim Pierce (twpierce@midway.uchicago.edu)
Wed, 26 Oct 94 18:30:59 CDT


> This also means that naive users are
> going to think that whatever they can do to make their document look right
> on the screen is fine. WYSIWYG. I've seen some discussion here about what
> people should and shouldn't do with various types of formatting, but lets
> just assume for a moment that people creating these documents are not going
> to realize the difference.

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.

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.