The W3C stops working on libwww !!!! Amaya, WinIE, MacIE, Netscape, libwww, what's next ?

Karl Dubost

My friend Tantek has often blogged about it (for instance here, here or here), before/during/after the recent changes in his professionnal life. And I blogged myself about it a few times. Now it's my turn to be affirmative. I am telling you, major professionnal changes in my life ahead. I won't accept incompetent management again. Carpe diem.

Is it just me, or the world around me... Something in the air probably, or just the start of another cycle in my life. It really looks like the last 10 weeks had a deep impact on my person, that my current wishes differ more than slightly from my wishes ten weeks ago. Hmmmm.

EMI Music condemned because of a protected music CD that some CD players can't read. YAY!!!

So Macromedia has released a new version of Dreamweaver that offers a "richer, more powerful CSS support". Cool. I have to trust their web site on that point since I have no license of Dreamweaver MX 2004 here on my laptop to check by myself.

But what am I really expecting from an HTML/XML+CSS wysiwyg editor and, in other terms, what are some of my future dreams for Mozilla Composer from a CSS perspective?

1. I want a selector builder. I want the contrary of the selectORacle, i.e. the ability to form a selector using pulldown menus and radiobuttons and the power of UI instead of typing by hand div.section1 p.notes + ul > li:first-of-type. I want to say "select the first list item of all unordered lists immediately following a paragraph of class notes contained in a div of class section1",
2. I want to be able to change the size of all elements using my mouse, not only images, tables, or positioned elements (aka layers); I want to be able to drag and drop an image file on the background of an element to set that background,
3. I want to be able to temporarily "disable" the application of a stylesheet to the edited document,
4. I want to be able to apply a Small Screen Rendering stylesheet to my document to see if it fits well on a cellphone,
5. I want not only a Rule Inspector but also a CSS OM Inspector. Mozilla's Document Inspector offers to inspect the computed CSS values of any element in the document. I want that, I need that, that is an incredibly powerful tool for web authors. A style rule inspector is, compared to Document Inspector, just a gadget from my point of view...
6. I want to be able to see immediately the effects of my changes on the stylesheets, changes that should be discarded if I click on Cancel. In Dreamweaver MX (not MX 2004), you can't undo changes if you have clicked on the Apply button to see the effects of your changes!
7. I want a stylesheet optimizer. There is not a single CSS editor on the market offering this for the time being.
8. I want to be able to automatically CSSize deprecated HTML attributes present in a document, I want my editor to be able to generate the CSS equivalent to the HTML attribute I am trying to set if I have accepted that behavior,

I want my CSS editor to be smart, not only a text field for a selector + a list of choices for all existing properties/values. I want it to do things I can't easily do myself switching to the source view. I want it to use a little bit the CPU of my laptop. I don't want it just because it's cool or fun. I want it because it could be a marvelous tool and the promise of an even more golden future for CSS.

MUCHO CONGRATULATIONS to ex-Netscaper Ján Varga and Mária Csubajová who just got married!!!! Yay!!!!

I have a lot of reasons for that. But that one is highly welcome now!!!

Here