Re: MS Word 6.0.1 (Mac) w/Internet Assistant, ClarisWorks (fwd)

David A. Roth (david@roth-music.com)
Mon, 15 Jul 96 17:34:48 EST

Messages sorted by: [ date ][ thread ][ subject ][ author ]
Next message: Paul W Schleck KD3FU: "Paul Schleck on Radio SHow w/info"
Previous message: Karl M. Bunday: "MS Word 6.0.1 (Mac) w/Internet Assistant, ClarisWorks"

In Regards to your letter <199607151452.RAA16555@vesuri.helsinki.fi>:
>
>
> > If there are Mac users maintaining their FAQs as HTML successfully with
> > tools that run on the Mac, I'd be interested in hearing about it. I
>
> Me too.
> I'm no fanatic. I believe it's perfectly feasible to have +near+
> WYSIWYG for a lot of things, but in my experience, some things just
> don't lend themselves to that very well.

I agree. Given the context that my purpose of using Word/IA was to edit
a HTML version of my FAQ (something not fancy at all), it was a
surprise to me. If someone were trying to use IA to design web pages
and had problems, I couldn't be surprised at all since this is more
complex.

> And now, the bad news: It's not perfect. By a long shot. The system
> I use is really, REALLY homemade, but the things I think I really have
> to have under my control are there. The rest is just up to me having
> the time to make it decent ... Partly testament to the grumpy attitude
> that I want it +exactly+ the way I want it, and partly that there are
> no really good tools on the {platform name here} side, either. :-/
I think what Microsoft tried to do with Internet Assistant and what is
also done with ClarisWorks is a step in the right direction but it
isn't there yet. We can no longer afford to take the attitude that
unless you came up from a University background of computing from the
1970s where unless you totally understand everything, you didn't
deserve to be able to do it. This attitude was also shared by musicians
when computers started to be used as sequencers for music performance.
This feeling in the old UUCP days was if you didn't know how to get a
bang path to 'decvax' then you had no business trying to send e-mail.
Today, this is laughable. The easier it is made for people to write,
feed and take care of FAQs, the better the Internet will be. I'm not
in favor of keeping it only for technical types. I would be in favor of
seeing something like a Hypercard program for writing FAQs that takes
care of the formatting for the user and generates the HTML. Sure, not
everything will be under their control but I think it can be a good
start. I saw something like this for users to be able to create their
own web page. Certainly it didn't do everything (i.e. no frames, etc.)
but it got them going and it worked.

David A. Roth
david@roth-music.com

Next message: Paul W Schleck KD3FU: "Paul Schleck on Radio SHow w/info"
Previous message: Karl M. Bunday: "MS Word 6.0.1 (Mac) w/Internet Assistant, ClarisWorks"

[ Usenet Hypertext FAQ Archive | Search Mail Archive | Authors | Usenet ]
[ 1993 | 1994 | 1995 | 1996 | 1997 ]