Hi Kelvin, thanks for your response.
Kelvin Eldridge wrote: > I have a background as an IT Consultant. I look for ways clients can do > things > themselves. I started down the path to promote OpenOffice.org HTML Editor as > a > tool for end users to create their own web pages and websites. > > End users don't know or want to know HTML. They just want to create pages. That's exactly the reason why the HTML editor still is a part of OOo: the "simple" (sorry) end user. Advanced users of Writer/Web often complained about the bad source code, the missing support for JavaScript etc. And we definitely won't add all this fancy stuff and we also won't try to rework the HTML export filter. We will also not improve the import filter a lot just to be able to import more web pages properly, our goal is not to have a universal web editor. For us Writer/Web is a tool to create your own HTML documents easily with as much layout control as possible. This seems to be your position also. As I wrote in my reply to Alexandro at least partially the resulting HTML code is so by intent - because it is easier to reimport it in a way that the document looks the same as before. As a compromise we consider to improve our XHTML transformation so that you can export your document in a way where the result looks more "professional". OTOH reimporting the document into Writer/Web might give less satisfactory results. You can see this transformation based filter as comparable to the PDF export: it's a publishing filter, not a "saving" filter. > Html Editor provides the user pretty much WYSIWYG editing with in-line spell > checking. For me any package that does not provide Australian English spell > checking is immediately ruled out. > > So right now I can't find a single other product which is free, runs on PCs, > and is good as HTML Editor. So this sounds as you see it the same as we do. Our problem is that we don't know how many people do the same. :-) > The next stage for me is to look for a low cost commercial package and that > is > what I am doing right now because I am not certain of the future of HTML > Editor. > > I do however think OpenOffice.org has something of value in HTML Editor. But > of course that is just my point of view. We also see this value, otherwise it would have been discontinued already. ATM there are no concrete plans to remove Writer/Web, just continuous reflections about maintenance costs and user value in return. And you can be sure that we won't remove a module from OOo immediately and without prior notice. This is a delicate matter and we surely would try to collect user opinions before. > With regards to using Writer instead of HTML Editor to create and maintain > web > pages, I feeling is it is not the right tool. It is was I would have used it > years ago. > > I had never thought to try using the Web Layout in Writer so thanks for that > suggestion. I learn something every day. > > To perform the first task you suggested I tried to open an "index.html" file > using OpenOffice.org it always opens with Writer/Web. I eventually settled > for > Insert -> File. Not a particularly clean way to work. There are four(!) filters to load HTML documents in OOo, two are from Calc, one for Writer/Web and one for Writer. You can choose the filter "HTML(Writer)" in the file dialog to load the file directly into Writer. For obvious reasons the "HTML" filter that loads the file into Writer/Web is the default filter. > Right now to edit a html file I right click on the file and select Open using > OpenOffice.org. Very clean and quick. That would be the same even without Writer/Web as then the Writer filter would become the default filter for HTML documents. > The unfortunate position you are in is most of the feedback you will get from > users is they don't like HTML Editor because it screws up the source code. See above. That alone wouldn't be a reason to remove Writer/Web. These people just aren't the target audience. > PS. Yes you are correct, but may I add there are at least two happy users. I > would have had many more by now except for the uncertainty. Well, there is no absolute certainty in anything. :-) You can be sure that Writer/Web won't vanish before OOo3.0. And removing it for 3.0 is also not planned yet. That's the biggest certainty I can give here. Ciao, Mathias -- Mathias Bauer (mba) - Project Lead OpenOffice.org Writer OpenOffice.org Engineering at Sun: http://blogs.sun.com/GullFOSS Please don't reply to "[EMAIL PROTECTED]". I use it for the OOo lists and only rarely read other mails sent to it. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
