🚀 go-pugleaf

On 29 Apr 1998 06:50:45 GMT, motorcicle@dont.want.no.pickle (Steve)
wrote:

>Back to Sausage.  During the height of its hype, I had a go of Hotdog, and
>wondered what the big deal was.  Basically just "notepad" with a few HTML
>helpers scattered here and there.  I must say I'm fairly amazed that people
>thought it good enough to warrant making the author a millionaire as result. 
>AOL-Press is IMHO a far better editor that has both WYSIWYG and raw-coding
>modes, and is completely free.  Failling that, using Netscape's built-in
>editor with notepad to optimise the (bloody messy) HTML that it generates.

Right time, right place, right people.  Never underestimate the
importance of "luck" when analysing business success.

There are startups in the USA (based on incredibly ill-conceived ideas
and projections) which are receiving (quite literally) *millions* of
seed-capital and VC funding - while I, who have a product and service
with a proven audience of 18 million users a month (that's half as
many as Yahoo and more than CNN), can't raise a bean (locally).

>Which brings me to another problem with most WYSIWYG editors.  They are
>often horribly inefficient.  I've seen some that generate code that treats
>_every_ letter separately when settings modes such as bolding etc.  (It's
>been months since I bothered writing HTML, so these references are bound to
>be wrong), e.g. instead of <UL>This text is supposed to be underlined</UL>
>it'd have <UL>T</UL><UL>h</UL><UL>i</UL> etc. etc.  Now, how dumb is this!? 
>I suspect that such ratshit HTML is much of the reason why 5Kb of text is
>downloaded to produce about 1Kb worth of characters on some pages I've
>seen.  I used to take great pride in my code, while not being stunning in
>it's appearance, being heavily optimised so that a fairly large page would
>still load quickly.

Exactly right.  The problem with WYSIWYG editors is that HTML was
simply never designed to implement a true WYSIWYG environment. It's
only a very simple mark-up language and, unlike Postscript, doesn't
offer the flexibility of accurate page-element positioning without the
use of "kludges" such as using image files to perform micro-spacing (a
practice which causes extensive code-bloat and can make pages look
god-awful for those who surf with their images turned off).

For this reason, hand-coded pages (or hand-tuning) are almost always
smaller and more efficient (faster loading, faster to display, etc).

I wonder why it is that very few professional Web designers rely
solely on WYSIWYG HTML editors?

>Sausage _should_ never have succeeded with their software, but then, IMO,
>neither should Micro$oft with their "quality" - marketing, luck and being
>there "first" plays a big part in success.  The product doesn't have to be
>good, you just have to _convince_ people that it's good.

Precisely.  The Net still attracts a lot of people who believe
everything they read and who are certain the Information Superhighway
is paved with gold.  They should look at my bank account for a dose of
cold, hard, reality ;-)

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