Re: [Fsfe-uk] Administrivia: html duplicates

[MJ Ray]

"Andrew Savory" <address@hidden> wrote:
> On 1/28/08, MJ Ray <address@hidden> 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 &nbsp;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 -
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