Re: HTML editor: does everyone need to be on the same page?

[Kate O'Neill <kate -at- kathleen -dot- net>]

John Posada wrote:
[...]
> So what?...does a <div> tag change the look of the page that much
> when it is applied by the application? Aren't <div> tags actualy
> specified in HTML standards since 3.0, supported by Opera since v2,
> NS since v2, IE since v3? Does XML tags change the look that much? Is
> applying XML coding such a bad thing?
> 
> With or without them, the page is going to look pretty much the same
> in the same browser. If you don't look at the code itself (and how
> many people outside of web authors are going to do this on a regular
> basis?), you usualy won't know.

Of course, in many cases, it isn't just the -look- of a 
page that matters. It's how long the page takes to 
download, how consistently it renders across browsers, how 
cleanly the code can be understood by accessibility tools, 
how easy all the pages are to maintain on an ongoing basis, 
and so on. WYSIWYG tools that produce strange code (with 
<div> tags, XML, extraneous font tags, and what have you) 
make some of those issues a bit harder to control.

But as for whether folks using WYSIWYG editors and folks 
using Notepad can co-exist in the same workgroup -- sure 
they can, but the Notepad people (and I'm one of them, so 
I know from first-hand experience) have to be willing to 
remain calm when the line breaks aren't where they want 
them, or when the capitalization is inconsistent, or when 
all the lines aren't neatly indented. There are far bigger 
fish to fry on -any- web project.

- Kate O'

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