Re: FN-FORUM: A better word processor?

date posted 1st April 2007 13:33

Jeremy Aston wrote:

> Interesting thoughts however - could HTML with CSS ever become something
> that could be properly used in any delivery scenario? My HO.... maybe
> but I think there is a danger of trying to make one thing do everything
> and thereby making it unwieldy and ultimately useless.

it's perfect for its intent.

let's not forget that hypertext markup language (plain text marked up
with tags) is designed for rendering by a html aware user agent with CSS
providing further "suggested" presentational markup.

PDF is a robust portable document format, as long as you have a reader

ODF is an open format for documents. (ditto)

XML is a low level markup language that can be transformed into many
other formats. (and in it's raw form might make sense to a human, or not...)

the OP's suggestion for separating content from presentation is
admirable, but the implications are the same as we currently have,
whatever format you provide, presentation of content is up to the user
agent that renders it.

Anything that can produce valid html and CSS would no doubt qualify as a
better word processor and my vote would go to TextMate on the Mac as the
most versatile processor of words!

the issue is the receiver, which is why most documents that are passed
from one person to another have all their rendering embedded in order to
overcome these issues, but try sending an .odt to someone with word98
and you have a problem.

of course sending someone an html document, with fully qualified url for
the CSS would work fine (as long as they were online.) go one step
further and embed your CSS in the head of the document and you have some
portability, save for linked images...



so, html and CSS as a substitute for word docs? not yet, maybe not
ever, but when we're all "on line"? maybe html5 and CSS3 might be the
answer then, but I'm sure IE9 will be buggering it up then too...

;o)