Test post from Word 2007

5 Responses

1. http://jeff.cutsinger.org/ Says:
   January 31st, 2007 at 4:06 pm
   It is incorrect for a WYSIWYG editor such as word to generate strong and em when a user bolds/italicizes a portion of text. This is because there are other uses for bold and italics. For instance, bold text is often used to indicate the defining instance of a term (this should be dfn in html). Italics are used for citation and foreign languages (cite and span class='...'). WYSIWYG editors are strictly presentational and so should generate presentational markup.
2. http://jeff.cutsinger.org/ Says:
   January 31st, 2007 at 4:08 pm
   I lost my comment text twice trying to post here, so I’ll make this short. WYSIWYG editors are presentational, so they should generate presentational markup. strong and em are inappropriate. b and i are the right choices.
3. niklas Says:
   January 31st, 2007 at 5:24 pm
   Hi Jeff, what you write is very interesting but I’m not completely sure I fully agree. Word is more than a plain WYSIWYG editor, it surely has the tools for conveying semantics in the form of lists, styles and so on.Arguably, for most use of bold and italics (I think) strong and em would be appropriate. There are certainly other cases as you mentions, Word (and other WYSIWYG editors) could solve this using styles (or similar). Word does this for quotes, among other things. In the case of the user not knowing this, and using bold for, e.g. defintion lists, I’m not convinced that strong is worse than b.

   Your first comment post seems to have gone though, but you didn’t see it before I approved it. Was there anything else that made you think the comment functionality wasn’t working? Anyways, thanks for keep on trying :-)

4. http://jeff.cutsinger.org/ Says:
   January 31st, 2007 at 7:19 pm
   Sorry for the double post. It would be nice for the interface to notify the user that his/her comment is awaiting moderation (at least I saw no indication of this). The first time I lost it was because I had cookies turned off.
   For bulleted lists and such, I agree that ul should be used. But when it comes to bold and italics, I think it’s the wrong thing to try to infer intent, even if it is accurate 90% of the time.
   Regarding the non-presentational features of Word, I must admit ignorance. But I still think if the user clicks a “b” button, it should output a b element.
5. niklas Says:
   January 31st, 2007 at 7:58 pm
   I agree, I’ll update the interface both to provide that feedback and make it clear that cookies is required (not that it should be, but it’s what the wp-openid plugin uses).

   The semantic-like features of Word are styles. If you go into blog mode in Word 2007, the styles will be, for example, quote, header1 and so on. In the list is also both strong and emphasize, so the best solution might have been to generate b tags when you click bold and to generate strong tags when you choose the associated style.

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