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– Ponderings & code by Drew McLellan –

– Live from The Internets since 2003 –

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Caveat Emptor

9 October 2003

When I was younger I used to get spam in the mail with things like free tickets to nightclubs for me and twenty friends. Offers of holidays on Greek islands, loans to buy fast cars, discounted subscriptions to racy magazines. Today I received spam from the Automobile Club with an offer of free luggage. Free brown luggage. And I thought, I actually thought ooh that looks nice. So is this it? Is this life from now on? Steak knives, carriage clocks, matching his’n’hers luggage and a teasmaid? Before you know it I’ll be ordering an ornamental plate from the back of the Radio Times and investing in caravan holidays. Bah.

Anyway, over the last couple of days I’ve been working away on a website content administration tool, making use of the rather wonderful XStandard WYSIWYG ActiveX editor. If you’re in the same line of work as me, you’ll want to take a look at XStandard. It’s the only tool of its kind I’ve found yet which outputs code I’m okay with. It’s fully XHTML, CSS and Accessibility tooled, and very configurable. One rather charming aspect of XStandard is that it point-blank refuses to load any data unless it is well-formed XHTML - we made friends instantly. It even has a simulated screen reader preview built in. The downside is that it relies on ActiveX, so you do have to know your audience, but for admin pages in a PC-based company, that was no problem for me.

The problem with WYSIWYG is that not only is it a pain in the butt to type (I literally have to say the words in my head), but it usually spells a free ticket for content authors and twenty of their friends to run amuck on your website. It offers them a weird sense of control, which, in reality, is merely evidence of the very lack of control. When the prisoners have control, the screws do not. The lunatics have taken over the asylum. I could go on.

It struck me that What You See Is What You Get is not dissimilar from the Latin phrase caveat emptor or as we like to translate it, buyer beware. Beware – what you see is what you get. The question is, do you really want it?

- Drew McLellan

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  1. § mike (b): I’ve been toying with the idea of taking the conventional WYSIWYG editor that IE provides, and transforming the output into valid XHTML on the ASP backend. I’m working on a blogging system for a few friends, none of which are technically savy, but nonetheless it would be an interesting thing to be able to write a function to transform the crappy HTML output that IE gives into valid XHTML.
  2. § Drew: My good friend Massimo Foti has developed a version of the IE editor that uses client side JavaScript to transform the output into XHTML. It performs the best it can (and does a good job) but at the end of the day yo’re always fighting a losing battle against a bad editor.
  3. § Bruce: what’s wrong with brown luggage? All my luggage is brown; it goes well with my brown dripdry, non-iron slacks.

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About Drew McLellan

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Drew McLellan has been hacking on the web since around 1996 following an unfortunate incident with a margarine tub. Since then he’s spread himself between both front- and back-end development projects, and now is Director and Senior Web Developer at edgeofmyseat.com in Maidenhead, UK (GEO: 51.5217, -0.7177). Prior to this, Drew was a Web Developer for Yahoo!, and before that primarily worked as a technical lead within design and branding agencies for clients such as Nissan, Goodyear Dunlop, Siemens/Bosch, Cadburys, ICI Dulux and Virgin.net. Somewhere along the way, Drew managed to get himself embroiled with Dreamweaver and was made an early Macromedia Evangelist for that product. This lead to book deals, public appearances, fame, glory, and his eventual downfall.

Picking himself up again, Drew is now a strong advocate for best practises, and stood as Group Lead for The Web Standards Project 2006-08. He has had articles published by A List Apart, Adobe, and O’Reilly Media’s XML.com, mostly due to mistaken identity. Drew is a proponent of the lower-case semantic web, and is currently expending energies in the direction of the microformats movement, with particular interests in making parsers an off-the-shelf commodity and developing simple UI conventions. He writes here at all in the head and, with a little help from his friends, at 24 ways.

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