that a CMS should store a <headline> rather than a <div> > with style, but why do you assume a _good_ WYSIWYG can't present the > author with a styled view (not just preview) in authoring time, while > saving off structured content? Some of us do, clients love the approach. > Multiple outputs - no problem, an author can pick a stylesheet to apply > to the content they are working on. Agreeing with Stewart here, authors > prefer editing in a visual context; and saving them a preview click is > worth it (if you value usefulness and usability). It's the job of the > CMS to ensure structure and a good one should not force authors to think > about that too much. > > Iva Koberg > liveSTORYBOARD, Inc.
Well, here goes this thread again :) Of course there are some things you can do to make it easier for authors to input content, if the xml structure is very straightforward rather than fleeflowing you can simply break it down into inputboxes, textfields etc. But I have to admit, I've yet to see a good XML wysiwyg editor. The problem is that people tend to take the approach that the can take an xml document, put an interface on top of it and turn it into an ordinary word-document, furthermore they think the authors can continue to be ignorant of the underlying paradigm of xml-documents. First of you can't have any xml document presented as a simple document because presentation of the xml document can do a lot of processing of the data in order to turn it into presentation (build indices, filtering ,add additional elements etc etc). Not all data in a XML document should even be visible, like attributes in most cases for instance. Sure if you have xml-document in a certain structure you migh pull it of or if you make a simplied presentation of the document for editing likewise but both is limiting. Secondly authors need to be aware about how the document should be structured and what the tags means otherwise the content won't be properly formatted. It's like word documents that you can "export as XML" in barriage of crappy tags, it's XML in the meaning that it's wellformed but it's hardly structured in a good fashion. I think the solution lies somewhere in the middle, present the content as an xml document but add a lot of tools for creating and editing it. * Begin with a template of the structure they can base their new work on * Make it easy to click on a tag and edit it's attributes * provide contextual descriptions of all tags* * Provide good means of validation* *Make it easy to preview the document with certain stylesheet so that they can get feedback as they work. * Provide shorcuts which inserts elements that are valid in the part of the document they're working on * You could as some editors do bind elements to certain css classes for immediate feedback even if I'm a bit sceptic about the addional work when fullpreview is one tab away. Maybe there's an editor that does all this, xMetal has a lot of these features if I remember correctly even though it goes a little too far in converting xml documents into word documents if I remember correctly. Not that this form of editing is mostly needed for articles and such where you can insert elements in various order and numbers, simple formats can as said before easily be inputed through normal forms. I think the main gripe here is making people aware of the shift in paradigm and I don't think there's any easy way around it. btw ":)" isn't presentation, it's content and would be much better represented with <happysmiley/> then it could be rendered graphically on mobilephones for example <happysmiley/> best regards --- Mattias Konradsson -- http://cms-list.org/ trim your replies for good karma.
