Dave wrote:
For users used to M$ Word it is quite a transition. 'Leading' them
gently from bold and underline and italic to semantic markup should
be made as easy as possible, even if it upsets the hard line semantic
folks.
Elliotte wrote:
However I do think that if the user just wants to do simple bolding
and italicizing of text, then they just want to do presentation-based,
non-semantic markup. And indeed they probably do want that, and that's
OK. But if so they should be using Word, not DocBook.
I must totally agree with Elliotte. I do usually agree with Dave in most
of his ideas, but not in this one. If someone wants to write a
presentation-based document, DocBook is not a good selection. There are
much better things for this (quark, pagemaker, even word or openoffice).
There doesn't exist the right thing for everyone, the program everyone
will use.
I think, Dave, the idea is a change or perspective. You say, to make a
gentle transition from Word to DocBook, let's make the markup less
semantic so we come closer to Word.
Let me give you another perspective. If someone is using Word and he
thinks about using some other tool, it's because Word doesn't give him
what he wants. If he chooses DocBook it will be due to it's semantic
markup and the separation between presentation and structure. You can't
then offer him a tool with the same options as his old one.
I accept that oXygen people have a challenge, how to make this
transition a gentle experience. But I don't think the way is to diminish
the power of the tool and of the underlying model. Novel ideas and
imagination will win in this task, don't get always the effortless way.
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