[Sc-devel] [bug] html conversion

[Scott Wilson]

On 1 Jun 2007, at 16:20, nescivi wrote:

> Hiho,
>
> On Friday 01 June 2007 08:54:50 Scott Wilson wrote:
>>>> anyone an idea why the html color scheme tends to age the colors  
>>>> each
>>>> time you open a document?
>>>
>>> For the Shortcuts helpfile, I have been editing it on Linux, where
>>> I had to
>>> stumble through the horrible source code that is automatically
>>> produced on
>>> the Mac.
>>>
>>> my main question is: why does it produces such unreadable code?
>>>
>>> in more detail: the stuff that looks nicely tabbed on the Mac, does
>>> not look
>>> like that in all html browsers, which makes overviews a lot less
>>> readable.
>>
>> As I've said before, that's not a problem with the html so much as
>> with using tabs for tables, which should not be done IMO.
>
> so convert those to proper tables where applicable? such as the  
> main help
> file?
> Let me check whether tables work well with the w3m-browser though...

That's one option, but I think Main help has outgrown the table  
approach anyway (it's the only file I know that uses it.). What I'd  
like to do is make a cross platform help browser using GUI, and then  
maybe have main help only include 'topics' files. Thoughts? Although  
Document working on Linux opens up other possibilities... :-)
>
>>> Also, I am not at all sure what the html code that is automatically
>>> produced
>>> actually tries to achieve. I found nothing online in HTML
>>> specifications that
>>> pointed to the use of <span> tags to create white space or tabs,
>>> which may be
>>> why it works so strangely.
>>
>> I found it surprising as well, but believe it or not it works a lot
>> better (and more consistently) than any other approach I've seen.
>> Certainly far better than using <pre>, which in any case creates
>> problems with WYSIWYG. Whitespace in HTML is kind of a problem, at
>> least if you want it to behave in a fashion similar to most normal
>> text documents.
>>
>> In any case, it is ugly html, but hopefully people won't need to read
>> it too often.
>
> Well, I need to see through it when I want to edit the file...
> I don't actually know a good WYSIWYG html editor on Linux (I'm not  
> a great fan
> of them either, because of the horrible code they tend to produce,  
> as showns
> by the NSblahblah one).

Yeah. Well don't spend too much time making the html pretty. The  
first time a file is edited on OSX NSblahblah will obliterate it.

S.