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Formatting for the HTML challenged.
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By fsterman , Section Wishlist []
Posted on Sun Jun 02, 2002 at 12:00:00 PM PST
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For some it is rather difficult to write a story, people that have no coding experience can be left out in the cold when it comes to formatting a submission. In this "story" I point out a semi elegant solution for the HTML inhibited.
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Many people have written in with cries of hatred toward HTML. These are usually people that have no coding experience but still wish to format their submissions. It is understandable, writing in HTML can be clunky for those not used to coding. It is frustrating since to get the desired emphasis one must type shift+comma, b, shift+period, WORD, shift+comma, slash, b, shift+period making a submitter perform up to 9 more tasks than they usually do just to make one word bold. We have tried to shorten the process by making auto-formatting an option, using other special characters for formatting. In doing this we have reduced the required number of actions from 11 to 4 (shift+8, WORD, shift+8), reduced the number of characters we can use, and still have not eliminated the need to learn a new way of typing. This method still technically is programming, just a less clunky form of it.
My solution is to eliminate the problem by instead of K5 making a new way of typing to instead tell people how to make there old way work with K5's submission method. The old way in this case is using any word processor and just exporting what they write as HTML. This solution does take more work in exporting, copying, and pasting but with lengthy heavily formatted submissions it is much easier. One could have more freedom with tables, citing sources, and maybe pictures if K5 or any of the other Scoop sites decide to implement them. It should be rather easy to have the engine just display whatever characters the submission contains giving the web browser the work to format all of the information (from what I know of Perl and what I assume about the Scoop engine). This would lessen the number of submissions with bad grammar/spelling (neither of which I am near perfect at) and make the grammar obsessed sleep easier at night.
There is no limit on who could use this way of submitting. Most every platform has Mozilla, which would be the simplest solution. Just make a new composer page, write your story, and copy/paste the information from the HTML source tab. Don't like Mozilla? Then use Open Office, Abiword, or any one of the bazillion free HTML WYSIWYG programs. Both office suites have builds for most any platform, are free, and have hit the 1.0 mark. Macintosh versions without X11 are just around the corner and of course there are ways to get a free office suite. We could make a How To guide for Word, Open Office, Abiword, Mozilla, and any other program we felt enough people used. The guides, if accompanied with pictures, wouldn't be long, at most a 2 or 3 paragraphs. All they would need to say is how to export the document open it in a web browser, and where to copy and paste.
While this operation could take more work to tech people the concepts are much easier and require much less practice and memorization. Without doing a full GOMS keystroke analysis I can guess that on less complicated projects HTML would be faster, but only by a little. Complicated projects would be much easier to manage in a word processor; tables, footnotes, lists, margins, and lots of other things take longer in straight HTML and get broken easily.
I believe we should get rid of auto-formatting or allow for people to choose if they want it. If what I say is taken into K5 we should probably post a poll to see how many people actually use the auto-formatting (or if it is possible to track it from the Scoop engine) and run from there. Maybe we could make it so that it would format the copy and pasted HTML. Snip off body tags and other non-essentials, make links out of bare URL's, and maybe make people use something like angled bracket, URL, angled bracket, angled bracket, text meant to be a link, angled bracket. Make the auto-format recognize anything with an <> (not the curly or square brackets to keep character set at it's largest) and "www" or "http" in it and change it to an href link. The option to turn auto-format off should be available to those who wish to write a piece with actual HTML examples in it. In any case we would need Scoop be able to either just pass off unknown HTML to the browser or recognized all off the weird HTML Mozilla and other programs can make.
Editors note: I probibally should rewrite this and do tests to make sure everything would work as I think it will work. This is just an idea though and if some things are wrong you people are much more capable to correct me and apply the basic priniciples. And of course I am tired and don't want to write anymore :). |
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