Scott Hudson wrote:
I think we're splitting hairs over 1 element in DocBook, 3 in DITA, and however many equivalents in infinite DTD/RNG/XSD schemas. There is, obviously, limited space in the UI. Why are you so opposed to having maps to 3 very familiar, commonly used buttons? And again, this is in author mode, not the tagged view (though it'd be nice if those buttons worked in that mode too!
The 3 very familiar, commonly used buttons you refer to are for 3 very familiar, commonly used aspects of presentational markup. They have no place in DocBook. Adding those three buttons to a semantic editor is like adding a steering wheel, accelerator pedal, and brake to a Boeing 767. Flying an airplane is not like driving a car, even if they're both vehicles that go from point A to point B. They need different interfaces. We can't teach someone to fly with a watered down user interface that pretends an airplane is something it's not. If we want semantic markup, we have to have semantic buttons.
I do expect that real semantic markup may not fit in a toolbar. Menus or palettes may be a better option than buttons. I do like the compromise that was suggested where the i button drops down to a menu, and the user has to choose the *reason* they're italicizing some text. That will actually help teach users and wean them off presentational markup in a way a simple one-click i-button won't.
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