RE:Re: More thoughts

Alex.Hopmann@resnova.com
Sat, 29 Oct 1994 00:55:21 -0500

In article of 11:16 PM 10/27/94, mag@ncsa.uiuc.edu (Tom Magliery) writes:
>I'm not disagreeing about the usefulness of a product that saves the
> user
>from entering tags the hard way, but at some level, the user is going to
>have to be able to indicate that some certain groups of characters in
> the
>document are, for example, a "level 1 header", or a "paragraph", and so
> on.
>So much the better if they've got WYSIWYG to boot.
I think Microsoft Word is a great example of such a scheme.

>But at the same time, from your point of view as creator of the product,
>it's important to adhere to the principle of "accept liberally, generate
>conservatively". What you're doing is generating HTML. While the user
> is
>happily pecking away at his document, you need to make sure that the
> HTML
>that you're quietly representing it with in the background is always
> valid.
>(Or if it temporarily isn't, somehow let the user know that something's
>wrong with what they're attempting to do.)
Well if we define that "unrecognized tags' are ignored, I think we can
generate HTML to do nifty stuff, that might get ignore, but oh well.
Recently I browsed some WWW pages using NCSA Mosaic version 1.x, and guess
what? No forms. But no crash, no great tragedy.

Alex Hopmann
ResNova Software, Inc.