Once
upon a time, in the early days of the Commercial Internet - in
mid-1999, to be precise - I tried using a couple of WYSIWYG HTML
editors and became
totally disenchanted with
them when each 
editor totally
mucked
up practically any coding
done outside
of the WYSIWYG interface.
editor totally
mucked
up practically any coding
done outside
of the WYSIWYG interface.
Today,
I tried using KompoZer to add styles to a short, hand-written XHTML
1.0 strict standard page. It promptly broke my page; wouldn't
render at all in Firefox 21.0 on Linux. It took an hour or so of repeatedly
overlooking the bug
to
discover that KompoZer
had changed this...
<script src="js/sked.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
to this...
<script type="text/javascript" src="js/sked.js" />
in addition to hosing my human-readable
indenting and such.
I had actually looked into the script
tag a bit when writing the XHTML page, and the use of start and end
tags seemed to actually be correct in this instance. The
twelve-year-old “HTML & XHTML The Definitive Guide, 4th
Edition” states on p. 434, “End tag: </script>; never
omitted”. So I went with that and didn't think more about it.
After this problem cropped up, I found
that page 514 of the same book indicates that any XHTML element with
no content like <p></p> may be written like <p />,
so KompoZer's change, while not necessary, should be ok. However, I
also found "guidelines" from the W3C "for authors who wish
their XHTML documents to render on existing HTML user agents" that
indicates not to do that for “an empty instance of an
element whose content model is not EMPTY”. <script>'s
content model isn't EMPTY. So for compatibility, should you use a
single <script ... /> tag? Fugetaboutit!
For
other things, WYSIWYG editors are fine. But
if a web content editor is going to make any
unnecessary changes at all to anything
I've written, then it's not for me.
Anybody
out there in cyberspaceland
know if Dreamweaver does this
sort of nonsense?
