Re: Developer's Tools (was Re: Archives and Web Site)

["Ian Bicking" <bickiia@earlham.edu>]

> > But the WYSIWYG for HTML is certainly possible.
> 
> Actually, I disagree with you there.  WYSIWYG is not possible with HTML,
> since HTML is a (primitive) semantic markup language rather than a
> layout language.  All of the attempts I've seen to force a specific view
> of the content on the users via HTML break rather badly in one or
> another context.  And most attempts to use HTML as a
> pseudo-page-layout-language are unintelligible in Lynx or to people
> using anything other than Netscape Navigator or MS Internet Explorer. 
> Many visually impaired people use Lynx with screen reader software to
> access the Web.

It isn't perfect, but there's no better solution that I know of.  
HyperStudio is far less platform-neutral.  The cards are made 
based on one resolution, which doesn't work well across different 
resolution screens.  Much of the layout is based on raster graphics 
(i.e., it's just a paint program), so screen readers couldn't even 
start to work with it, not to mention all the other problems this 
causes.  If you want to put it on the web you have to get a special 
plugin.

Tcl/Tk would be better than HyperStudio, but still couldn't approach 
HTML in portability.  To run the program a teacher or student writes 
you would need a special set of libraries which only Un*x boxes 
have by default.  It's not hard to distribute those libraries, but even 
a small thing can hamper distribution significantly.

User interfaces either use strict packing, which can make 
programs annoying to use on low-res systems, too small on high-
res systems, or else you define the interface more loosely and let 
Tk decide how it will ultimately be layed out, and then you no 
longer have a good layout mechanism.  I think the conflict between 
layout and platform-independance are inherent.

HTML isn't great.  And to use it like HyperStudio is something of a 
distortion of its goals.  But I don't see a better alternative.


This doesn't have to be a complete HTML editting program, 
however.  It could still be useful even if it only implemented a 
subset of HTML.  It would be okay if it wasn't able to load HTML 
files created by other programs, or perhaps not import all of the 
formatting (being able to import the raw content of a page would be 
useful).  You don't have to be able to make the spiffiest site 
possible.  But what you can do with the program should all be very 
visually concrete and easily accessible.

The typical HyperStudio stack is a bunch of cards (pages) with 
some buttons that go to other cards (hyperlinks), and some text 
and pictures put here and there.  Not very complex.

Oh... one other thing I thought of that is good about HyperStudio.  
Using/viewing the stack isn't a seperate process from editting the 
stack.  This makes for a very short authoring/testing cycle, and 
makes things particularly concrete.

The more I think about it, the more I think concreteness is the 
most important aspect of HyperStudio and its potential 
replacement.


--
Ian Bicking <bickiia@earlham.edu>