Macworld Expo and Web Standards: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly
By Dori Smith | January 15th, 2005 | Filed in Authoring Tools
Skip to comment formI 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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