On Wed, May 16, 2007 at 09:22:09AM -0400, Andrew Whitworth wrote:
I have to admit
that I don't quite understand the above use of the
term WYSIWYG;
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WYSIWYG>
I was under the impression that WYSIWYG is a property of the software,
not the markup language. You can type HTML markup with a text editor,
or use a WYSIWYG editor to create it from your What-You-See layout.
By WYSIWYG, people mean that HTML is typically relative and the layout of a
webpage may be different depending on a number of factors.
But even this quality (and I'd discourage usage of WYSIWYG to describe
it) isn't specific to HTML in that it applies to most markup
languages. LaTeX for instance requires no declaration of page size.
In that sense both markup languages simply describe the structure of
documents, leave styling to stylesheets/document-classes and rendering
to user-agents/typsetting-software.
This, proponents argue, is one of the great advantages of markup over
WYSIWYG editors.
To a small
degree, webpages will render different browsers, but even in the same
browser the webpage will render differently when the browser is resized,
etc.
Setting the negligeable differences between W3C recommendation
compliant user agents aside; most substantial differences in rendering
(such as flow around blocks depending on window and font sizes) are
actually features of multiple-media-compatible markup, not bugs.
For a great example of "what you see is not what
you get", try to
print a webpage, and compare the printout to what you see on your computer
screen: The page needs to be re-rendered to fit onto a piece of paper
(especially if you print in "portrait", not "landscape").
Print preview.
Different media calls for different displaying. While this may seem
like a disadvantage, markup languages such as HTML actually use this
to their great advantage. By seperating content and style, you can
prepare a document for several media types with minimal redundancy.
I've printed with both Opera and Firefox. Printouts from both match
their print preview renderings.
Instead of
going through too much pain developing a tool to convert
MW-markup into LaTeX, why don't we just see if modifying the printing
style-sheet is sufficient for our needs?
That's the approach that i've been taking, personally. I've done some work
on some printing templates that help to format a printed book, but don't
look so good on the screen
Do these templates have styles or classes defined in stylesheets?
By putting the style declarations in the print media stylesheet,
on-screen rendering won't take them into account.
(how do you render a page break on the computer
screen?).
The screen is only one page; so you don't. This is why different media
calls for different stylesheets.
I think that there is alot that we could do straight
from the
HTML, if we avoid things that don't work when printed, and if we are
willing to do the work to implement the proper styles for printing.
What, exactly, are the displaying problems that need to be addressed?
I just printed
<http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Circuit_Theory/Energy_Storage_Elements>
to a file with Opera and it looked pretty good. I can send it to you
or put it up online if you'd like to have a look at my copy.
Cheers,
Martin
--
\u270C