e-mail: schales@igd.fhg.de
URL: http://www.igd.fhg.de/~schales/
Browsing the World-Wide Web via graphical browsers like Netscape or Mosaic is easy. The users have powerful tools to read the huge amount of on-line information's. But not everybody is satisfied by merelyreading documents, many people want to provide information themselves.
But there is a big barrier to surmount, the knowledge of the special hypertext mark-up language (HTML) used by the WWW. To minimise that handicap, a variety of tools have been developed to assist editing and creating Web documents.
There are different ways to create HTML-document, where each way has pros and cons. The easiest way to write documents is using a simple ASCII text editor. But you have the problem of knowing the syntax of HTML. The next step is to use an HTML special ASCII editor, these tools extends an ASCII editor with a small knowledge of HTML. The user can enter special HTML tags by clicking a menu or a button. But the author has to know about the syntax and structure of HTML. As a consequence, a lot of Web documents do not conform the syntax of HTML.
Another approach are text to HTML converters. You will find several converters for the standard text formats like RTF, Word, LaTeX, etc. All of these converters have one big shortcoming. In most cases you have to edit the HTML output to add the hyper text features like hyper text links or inlined images. This go ahead with the knowledge of HTML.
The possibilities described above are only incomplete solutions for the problem. Only special HTML editors can support the characteristics of the hypertext mark-up language (HTML). This editor has knowledge of the HTML syntax, and thus can protect the user to create incorrect documents.
In the Fraunhofer Institute for Computer Graphics we are developing a WYSIWYG Web-editor. This tools allows the user to edit HTML documents like normal text document without knowledge of HTML. At the moment the editor supports the HTML 2.0 standard[conn95]. There is a possibility to configure the DTD, means the description of the HTML syntax, to configure the editor for future changes of HTML. Since the editor bases on this syntax description, a user can't create incorrect documents.
There is support for special hypertext features like links and inline pictures. The user can choose a destination document by selecting via a file selector box and setting other attributes with comfortable dialogs. The editor allows to type special character entities like normal characters. A screenshot of the editor may show the interface and a glimpse of the functionality.
The editor is developed on an Apple Macintosh 68k with Symantec C++.