Visual Authoring: Visual Site Management and Link Management.
The Tark will be able to manage large sites, support testing-
and staging servers, and feature powerfull and reliable link management.
Visual Authoring: Visual editing of HTML documents.
The Tark allows fast and easy editing of plain HTML 3.2
documents without DTP-like layout features or support for DHTML;
the editor will instead force the separation of content and presentation
by using CSS. Future extensions might include an advanced integration of
Includes and support for scripting languages like PHP.
There are several competing concepts dealing with the
presentation of editable content to the user:
- WYSIAYG: What You See
Is All You Get,
- WYSIWYG: What You See
Is What You Get,
- WYSIWYN: What You See
Is What You Need,
- WYSIWYW: What You See
Is What You Want,
- YAFIYGI: You asked for
it, you got it.
There is something I rediscover all the time; I want to get started
quickly; Microsoft's Windows enables me to do so without caring about
what I'm doing; at first usually everything works; that's where Linux
loses (currently); at first almost nothing works out of the box.
But later, when I've done the work, I want the possibility to
optimize and understand things. That's where Windows begins to lose
(having spent hundreds of Euro for Microsoft's Resource Kits, Technical
References etc. I know where the limits of Windows and it's applications
are); and that's where Linux is supposed to win, because there's no
limit for digging into it.
The structure is similar: In Frontpage I can easily create documents
by using the mouse and the menues; the menues and dialogues give me the
options the program offers; later, when I want to accelerate my work, I
momorize the keybord shortcuts in the menues and can operate the
complete application without touching the mouse (yes, that's possible
with Frontpage ;). This is kickstart!
Since I have never formated documents "by hand" that's the way I'm
using Frontpage, also: Designing a CSS and linking it into any HTML
document. I never again care about the presentation of any headline or
paragraph, I'm just writing plain HTML 2.0 (mostly). A tool that offers
me an adequate set of style sheets or document templates by default
would make no difference to me. But to learn what styles have to be used
for stuff I want to do you'd have to give some kind of visualization of
what they're doing.
What does this mean to applications? I assume, most of "normal"
people think like me; they want (or have to) solve problems, like
connecting modems to an ISP, printing documents, accessing file servers,
building honeynets, or whatever; they want to get started quickly, so
they need something self-explaining and somehow visual.
They want to get good results, so there has to be some powerfull
backend doing the work.
They want to be able to accelerate their work, when they have learned
the application by using it the "Kickstart" way (starting it up and
immediately begin using it, without learning any editing modes or
command). When they trust the application, and have understand haw it
works, then the applications has to offer them a great choice of
enhanced interfaces, like accelerator keys for every function.
Most Linux applications I know of have terrible learning curves, even
if they're not totally buggy: they work the other way aroung; one has to
learn commands, modes, get used to several different and even in itself
inconsistend UIs etc.
Giving Linux users WYSIWYG tools with fonts and sizes and colours is
condemned to fail since the results will be as terrible as they are
under Windows, so you have to remove it (not the users, the font and
colour opotions), or hide it; now the application has to guess what the
user wants to do (WYSIWYM approach). This should be visualized but not
necessarily in WYSIWYG mode but in a way helping them to understand what
the program has guessed and therefore suggests.
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