Re: Musings on creating an HTML-based WYSIWYG mode

[Søren Pilgård]

On Tue, May 1, 2018 at 10:11 PM, Lars Ingebrigtsen <address@hidden> wrote:
>
> Søren Pilgård <address@hidden> writes:
>
> > The question is if it is worth the effort?  To me the greatest benefit
> > of a WYSIWYG editor would be if I could edit in the "finished" website
> > eg. sort of like editing the elements in the developer tools of
> > chrome/firefox. That means CSS has to be supported, and potentially
> > also javascript. If a website is only HTML it is easy enough for me to
> > visualize how it is going to look.
>

Dont let my comments be seen as a detraction of your project.
I only tried to put words on how a WYSIWYG editor would fit in with MY
use of Emacs. There are of course many different people using Emacs in
many different ways.

> You seem to be talking about programming a web site, not writing text?

Yes, HTML is the base for quite a lot of webpages. And my guess would
be that most people writing HTML in Emacs are doing it to be published
on the web as a site or part of such.

>
> The vast majority of text out there on the web is produced in a WYSIWYG
> editor of some kind or another, for instance the JS-based editor in
> Wordpress or any of a number of editors inside other CMS systems.

I belive you are right. Most content is probably written in some CMS
system WYSIWYG editor.
My guess is in fact that most content on the web is created by people
who dont know HTML at all.
How many of these people would realisticly switch away from the build
in editor and switch to Emacs for doing this content?
Especially as the CMS might not be working with HTML at all but
potentially some other Markup langauge more friendly for focusing on
the content.
Further the CMS systems could extend the markup with custom components
useful in the system.
When you combine this with the styling/theme of the CMS it is very
hard for Emacs to present the HTML in a way that is equivalent to the
CMS system.

>
> > Building a WYSIWYG editor in Emacs sounds like a complicated affair
> > and I am not sure it is really worth it as editing plain standalone
> > HTML is becoming a niche thing. It could be useful for HTML emails
> > though!
>
> Editing text for publication is far from a niche thing, and HTML is the
> common serialisation format.
>
I do know HTML is used for classical publications. But even then the
HTML is most likely consumed by some tool that combines it with the
styling used for the final result.
Thus the HTML presented to you and the result in a book will not look
the same if the same styling is not applied. The simplest thing is how
pages are split and margins are fitted.
When writing a book/article and seing the result immediately is
needed, I think one the most essential things looked for is how it is
layed out over multiple pages.

At least these are my experiences from doing LaTeX in Emacs. I use the
execelent auctex tooling that even has the abillity to preview/show
the result inline in the buffer as it is typed.
When a formula is completed it is shown as rendered, but if you move
the point back into it you see the latex formula instead.
But even with the preview WYSIWYG features available I ended up rarely
using it, instead prefering to have a PDF reader open next to Emacs
controlled from within emacs.