Forget about tables for a moment. If Radio is really going to push CSS, the place it has to be done is in this WYSIWYG editor.

Do forget about tables. Let your designer decide how to accomplish the gross layout of the page when he creates templates and style sheets for your site. Look at what happens in the writer’s text box.

Remember that the purpose of CSS is to separate structure from presentation.

The writer’s job is to create the body of a structured text document, which identifies what all of the elements are.

The designer’s job is to affect its presentation, by creating a set of style guidelines which determine how each element is presented. These guidelines are embodied in a single style sheet, separated from from the text.

Thus the writer's tool should primarily let her apply structural HTML tags to text (whether it be through typing raw HTML, using an outliner, or a editing in a WYSIWYG tool that that hides the code). This structured text will render sensibly in any web browser. An old browser, like Mosaic or Netscape 2, will use simple default values: bullets for an ordered list, bold-faced strong text, italicized emphasized text. A text-based browser like Lynx, a cell phone or a Manila site’s email bulletin will use simpler rendering. When the rendering is through a modern browser and your designer has done a lot of work on the style sheet—or even multiple alternate style sheets—the sky’s the limit.

This ability for one structured document to be rendered differently is an example of scalable content.

The final presentation is created in the web browser.

Read that last sentence again. The designer doesn’t lay out each page, just creates the rules on how to lay it out. This is client-side scalable content.

Coming back to Kevin’s article, I have to agree that Radio really has to push CSS in the WYSIWYG editor. But only by creating well-formed structural HTML.

Postscript:

Kevin also writes ‘What are examples of WYSIWYG products that do CSS right?’

the fact that style sheets are rules for how to layout the page is also why WYSIWYG design tools are so bad at CSS-based sites. The browser does the layout. If you’re using HTML for writing and CSS to define presentation separately, you don't need a layout program. You write the rules, the browser does the layout.

The other problem is that most WYSIWYG tools don’t differentiate between the roles of writers and designers. The beauty of Manila and Radio is that they separate the roles, giving the writer direct access to the body of each page, and the designer access to the template and style sheet of the entire web site.

[caveat: I’ve never used the Manila/Radio WYSIWYG editor myself, since it only works on MSIE Windows, and I use a Mac.]   11:45:06 PM