"Andrew Savory" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On 1/28/08, MJ Ray <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > So far as I've seen, HTML editors are still much harder to use than > > text editors, either needing one to write first and markup later or > > jump to-and-fro from keyboard to mouse. What's the state of the free > > software art here? > > Harder to use for whom?
Anyone. I thought to-and-fro'ing was well-known to be slow, painful, and so on and I've not seen free software html editors (particularly webmail) which offer things like ctrl-B shortcuts *and* produce tidy markup. Maybe they're there and I've just not met them - what's the best free software editor? [...] > The state of the art is probably HTMLAreas such as Xinha, which offer > a rich experience and IIRC keyboard shortcuts. http://xinha.webfactional.com/ ? In a quick test, it seems to offer keyboard shortcuts but doesn't really announce them anywhere AFAICT and my input seems to be plagued with s that I can't eradicate. > > Also, I'm not convinced by someone else's argument which seemed to be > > roughly that several non-free-software MUAs (Outlook, Thunderbird (OK, > > so there's IceDove), MSN, Googlemail, Yahoo) send HTML by default. > > Their operators should fix that configuration error IMO. > > One person's configuration error is another person's "defaulting to > the majority opinion". If the majority opinion was all that mattered, wouldn't we just be using Windows and Outlook? > > It's not blocking html "just on the basis of it being HTML". It's > > blocking it on the basis of it wasting much space, bandwidth and CPU > > on several machines (it seems lists.gnu was upgraded last year, but I > > wonder how long before it gets stressed again); and all the html-ready > > MUAs can read text, but not necessarily the other way round. > > I thought the space/bandwidth/CPU arguments were overwhelmed by > Moore's Law years ago :-( Things dealt with by Moore's Law aren't so much of a worry, except for the scale of these lists, but climate change/energy use pushes back a little. > > I wish free software were innovating in this area, but it seems like > > keyboard-based editing is not slick, and the main innovations have > > been finding ways to filter/reduce html mail into plain text. > > Perhaps one reason innovation has been inhibited is precisely because > mailing lists where FS folk hang out are rigorously enforcing policies > that just about made sense in 1998 but not in 2008? Perhaps. Anyone know some numbers and is there any evidence it harms progress in any other ways? > > So far it looks like there is no consensus for change. > > Looks around 50/50 to me (though I wasn't clear on Noah's or Jon's > viewpoint). I hope in the presence of a tie the moderator votes in > favour of progress :-) I think the usual default is the status quo in such things, isn't it? Regards, -- MJ Ray http://mjr.towers.org.uk/email.html tel:+44-844-4437-237 - Webmaster-developer, statistician, sysadmin, online shop builder, consumer and workers co-operative member http://www.ttllp.co.uk/ - Writing on koha, debian, sat TV, Kewstoke http://mjr.towers.org.uk/ _______________________________________________ Fsfe-uk mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/fsfe-uk
