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Dori Smith and Tom Negrino's thoughts about technology, politics, and culture since 1999

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Macworld Expo and Web Standards: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

January 15, 2005 by Dori Smith

I just got home from Macworld Expo, and I spent some time looking around through the eyes of someone who cares about Web standards…

The good: If you have OS X, and you don’t have TextWrangler 2.0 from Bare Bones, go download it now. It’s okay, I’ll wait. Back now? Hey, it’s free, it’s from the same folks who make the amazing BBEdit, and did I mention that it’s free? It doesn’t have quite all the same features as BBEdit, but you should check it out if haven’t yet. BBEdit is simply the finest text editor money can buy on OS X, and TextWrangler is a good way to get that first taste that’ll make you want more.

The bad: Apple’s newly-announced Pages application looks like a wonderful little lightweight page layout program… and a terrible disaster as a HTML editor. Yes, it does let you export as HTML but trust me, you shouldn’t. The number one complaint about MS FrontPage is that it has a tendency to make pages that only look good in IE/Win. Pages created in Pages don’t even look good in Safari.

The ugly: The only thing that looked worse than the way Pages-generated pages looked in Safari was how “View Source” looked for those same pages in Safari. Any application newly released in 2005 that doesn’t know how to add a DOCTYPE to the page, well, shouldn’t be used to create pages. Please.

Apple, please, please — either fix the HTML that Pages creates, or remove the HTML option entirely. The last thing the Web needs is more crap.

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Posted in Uncategorized | 18 Comments

18 Responses

  1. on January 15, 2005 at 2:32 am Web Standards Project BUZZ

    Macworld Expo and Web Standards: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

    I just got home from Macworld Expo, and I spent some time looking around through the eyes of someone who…


  2. on January 15, 2005 at 3:49 am ralph

    Well, at least if you’re trying to use the spaghetti code that Pages generates, you can use TextWrangler to wrestle it into shape….


  3. on January 15, 2005 at 4:05 am Denis Defreyne

    I’m really looking forward to Pages. Not as a HTML editor, but only as a DTP tool–the only thing that matters.


  4. on January 15, 2005 at 9:03 am Chris

    Thanks for the heads up on Pages and HTML export. This was one of the first things I was interested in. Shame it’s as munged as you say it is but perhaps we can fix it with TextWrangler as ralph said. really all I would want is something to HTMLize the text and then drop into a template HTML document.
    Ah well. We’ll see when it gets here next week. Just need to start harping on Apple.


  5. on January 15, 2005 at 11:38 am Jeffrey Hardy

    It’s sad that Pages apparently produces sub-standard html (and no mention of xhtml). Perhaps I’m oblivious to the challenges that face software developers, but with all the buzz surrounding standards vs. ie these days, you’d think that Apple would have had the insight to gracefully exclude sub-standard browsers (like ie) by having Pages produce nice, semantic xhtml.


  6. on January 15, 2005 at 4:41 pm Jacob M. B¯tter

    Pages – Frontpages efterf¯lger?

    Til Macworld introducerede Apple et par interessante softwareprodukter, bl.a.


  7. on January 15, 2005 at 5:49 pm -b-

    MS isn’t in the html business and neither is Apple. That doesn’t make it ok, but it just not a priority. Easy documents are.


  8. on January 15, 2005 at 6:03 pm Dori

    MS isn’t in the html business and neither is Apple.
    Define “the HTML business”, please. MS has three products that create HTML (FP, Word/Win, Word/Mac) and Apple’s about to have one. If they don’t want to be in the HTML business, they should stop selling applications that create HTML.
    Personally, I think that Pages is a great little page layout app. If people want to put Pages-created documents on the Web, they should export as PDF and put the PDF docs up. But the HTML that’s generated is just bad, and either ought to be fixed or killed.


  9. on January 15, 2005 at 7:23 pm Tom

    I’d point out that besides Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Entourage save their documents as Web pages, so Microsoft is certainly in the HTML biz with Office. And none of them save documents with a DOCTYPE. And they all use that horrible MS HTML/XML. Now, should that be fixed? Sure. But to say, as Dori does above, that if it’s not fixed the Web export feature should be killed, is just silly. That’s not going to happen; doing a quick Web export to share documents is just too useful for business users.
    I’d love to see any of these apps, or Apple’s Pages, produce decent code. But that’s not what they’re really about. Nobody should think that any of these apps should be used to make finished Web pages. I think it would be nice of the two developers cleaned up the exported page code to minimal standards, but it’s probably a waste of developer’s resources to spend the time to make them as standards-compliant as something like, say, Dreamweaver.


  10. on January 15, 2005 at 7:34 pm Dori

    Hey, wait a sec… I wasn’t saying that the HTML export features of MS Office should be killed. That wasn’t the question!
    Given that Pages hasn’t even shipped yet, and that I’ll guess that nobody is going to buy it just for its HTML capabilities, and that it doesn’t even look acceptable (much less good) in the company’s own browser, well, why not kill it? It’s not like anyone’s gotten to the point of depending on it.


  11. on January 15, 2005 at 7:44 pm Tom

    As silly as it seems to argue with my wife on our blog, I’ll just say that it’s way too late to kill anything about iWork 1.0. The iWork engineering lead told me at the show that what Apple was showing on the floor was the final golden master code, and it has already been duplicated and will be delivered to customers beginning next Saturday.


  12. on January 15, 2005 at 8:35 pm -b-

    You missed the point. It’s about office docs and extending office docs for MS, not html – no they are not in the html business, they are in the office docs business, their cash cow. But this is about Apple. I pointed out MS as an example, because of all the features they’re working on, outputting XHTML so standards-geeks are happy is probably really low on the list. As I said above, that doesn’t make it right or us standards people happy, but it’s reality.


  13. on January 16, 2005 at 11:21 am John Dowdell

    Being able to publish to a web page, easily and without hassle, is useful.
    But I’m trying to imagine the effects of unpopular markup styles on other people, and I’m having trouble seeing the impacts… maintainence problems could be one way to affect other people… hmm… there’s got to be more… in what other ways might “no DOCTYPE” and the other things you saw affect other people…?


  14. on January 16, 2005 at 3:03 pm Dori

    Thanks for chiming in, John! (and sorry that Macromedia wasn’t at the show). In the very brief amount of time that I got to look at the HTML aspects of Pages, I saw two major problems:
    – The resulting HTML file looked like hell in Safari. If your own app can’t produce good results in your own browser, what’s the point? Safari is a great browser, but it can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.
    – No DOCTYPE matters in terms of Doctype switching and quirks mode at a minimum, and I suspect you know that. I didn’t get a chance to get into the nitty-gritty of the markup itself (when the group checking out the app is me, Tom, Sandee Cohen, and Peachpit Press’s Executive Editor and Editor-in-Chief, it’s pretty clear who the least important person is there). I’m looking forward to seeing more, but if Apple got one glaring thing like that wrong, and given that Safari, a darn good browser, couldn’t render the page acceptably, I have to assume that there’s other problems too.
    And I wouldn’t exactly call it hassle-free, either; imo, the type of person who would only be willing to use Pages to author pages would be uncomfortable with the requirement that they also needed a separate FTP app.


  15. on January 16, 2005 at 4:36 pm ben

    I think it’s time for me to chime in.
    It’s easy from an engineering standpoint to say “hey, HTML’s just another export format and easy to support, so why not?” If a collaborator, client, or whoever is using a given word processor as their primary authoring tool for the generation of content but they don’t know HTML, I’d rather they export it to HTML, even crappy HTML, rather than putting in on the Web in RTF, PDF, or whatever proprietary format $word_processor uses.
    Plaintext would be even better, but has huge limitations, even when compared to crappy HTML.
    Having said (written) that, I think it’s kinda shortsighted to create markup that can’t be plugged into an information system with nil for effort – and the intensity with which I hold that opinion doesn’t change whether we’re talking about people who do production manually but don’t bother keeping up their skills, or productivity software, or DAV tools.
    The feelings I have for the Big Three – GoLive, Dreamweaver, and FrontPage – spring from an especially icy and bitter corner of my heart for this very reason.


  16. on January 19, 2005 at 10:45 pm Patrick Kelley

    I love standards.
    Now you know who I am.
    Downloaded Picasa 2 today from Google.
    Exported gallery using html exporter.
    Valid xhtml? No.
    Doctype? No.
    I thought Google liked standards?


  17. on January 20, 2005 at 12:19 am Dori

    I love standards.
    That’s nice. And your point is?
    Now you know who I am.
    Actually, no, I don’t. What’s your point?
    Downloaded Picasa 2 today from Google.
    Exported gallery using html exporter.

    And I should care about this why?
    Valid xhtml? No.
    Doctype? No.

    And I am surprised? No.
    I thought Google liked standards?
    If that’s the case, you didn’t hear that here. And to the best of my knowledge, it’s not the case.
    So, what is your point?


  18. on January 30, 2005 at 1:07 am cpawl

    I too can not believe how sloppy “pages” creates the HTML file. The export to the web feature is going to be HUGE amoungst users and Safari (or any other browser for that matter) can not render the page correctly. It’s a shame. The main reason I wanted this app was to create quick mock pages to send to family and friends. Apple is going to catch alot of slack on this one.



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