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humanized philosophy

the other day i started teaching Michelle code, and from the start I went about it all wrong. “This is a DOM tree… This is a div tag…” i’m sorry. next time around i’m going to work on a new approach involving assignments layed out something like:

  • draw your website using whatever medium you feel most comfortable in
  • re-draw the same design using only straight lines and solid colors
  • re-write the same design content using absolutely no graphics
  • i haven’t worked this out entirely…

but really it just makes me want to build a better WYSIWYG editor that is actually user friendly following the philosophies of companies like humanized and 37 signals. An editor that doesn’t assume you want this to be a paragraph and that to be a line break, but makes symantics an intigrated part of the process, and naming and creating styles the easiest thing in the world. Something that treats you more like text edit and less like microsoft word. entirely unlike either dreamweaver or iweb. the one with too many buttons and lists and assumptions, the other with no option to even view the code. i want a program that will do it all for you, and teach you a new way of thinking all without breaking your train of thought. i think it’s possible and i think we should do it.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 19th, 2006 at 2:19 pm by eric and is filed under web design, geeky, startup, wysiwyg. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

3 Responses to “humanized philosophy”

  1. tim Says:

    July 19th, 2006 at 6:58 pm

    Hmm, sounds like you might have a vision there for starting an open source WSYWIG html editor project. Nvu’s the only one in the game right now that I no of and I don’t recall being impressed:

    http://www.nvu.com/index.php

  2. carl Says:

    July 21st, 2006 at 5:44 pm

    i’m back! though not for long, until they get wireless internet up at Bear Butte.

    yeah, agreed, let’s do a good wysiwyg xhtml/css editor.

    plus, humanized is great, thanks for the introduction. and via the humanized blog, i found moonEdit, which looks awesome. I’m itchin’ to try it.

    Oh, and check out humanized reader. Looks like a fairly ordinary simple aggregator. See if you can figure out why it’s special.

  3. eric Says:

    July 21st, 2006 at 5:59 pm

    moonEdit is fascinating. i’m so addicted to Backpack and Writeboard now that I’ve started paying the $5/month to get unlimited writeboards.

    the humanized reader was actually my introduction to them. it was mentioned on the 37 signals blog. there are, of course, some problems with the idea - as commenters point out. for example: you can’t trust your scrollbar - it keeps changing it’s mind. but the thought is moving in a good direction.