On Tue, 11 Oct 2005, Douglas Royds wrote:
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/wysiwyg.html
<blockquote>
We've now reached the limits of the current GUI paradigm. ... Microsoft Word
2003 has 1,500 commands, and users typically have no clue where to find most
of them... WYSIWYG ... forces too much manual labor on users and requires a
stretch of imagination to envision results in advance... You begin with a
blank screen and must build up to your goal one step at a time.
>snip<
Well, well, well. Those clever boys and girls at Microsoft have finally
realised that you do need to separate style from content. What they propose
is - gasp - to allow you to simply type in your content, and separately
choose a style for it. No doubt they are also busily flooding the US Patent
Office (and IPONZ, going by past performance) with descriptions of the
bleeding obvious.
In a sense MSWord has always had stylesheets. It is just that they have
always caved in to that class of PHB that I call pixel pushers. Thus you
can always push any particular MSWord heading one pixel to the left or
right, or make it one pixel bigger and the third character in a entirely
different font.
And after a pixel pusher has been at your document for a day, your
stylesheet is just plain useless.
The next version of Microsoft Office ... will be based on a new interaction
paradigm called the results-oriented user interface [which] displays
galleries of possible end-states, each of which combine many formatting
operations. From this gallery, you select the complete look of your target...
it's now What You Get Is What You See, or WYGIWYS.
The question then is whether they still have caved in to the Pixel
Pushers. My guess is yes, so it all just plain doesn't matter. It's just
frosting on a pig.
However, this is a wake-up call for the Open Source community. Name the tools
that I can use to separately edit style and content.
XML/XHTML/SVG and CSS2 is starting to get really really very good. We just
need to build on that and beware of going down the road of pixel pushers.
Inkscape as a drawing package and SVG as a drawing exchange and delivery
medium is looking really Good. Not nearly perfect yet, but Good.
Firefox just needs to understand SVG a little better and paged media
better and things will be Good.
There are profound reasons why that hero of computing, Donald Knuth,
created Tex so the fontfamily was specified once and only once for the whole
document...
John Carter Phone : (64)(3) 358 6639
Tait Electronics Fax : (64)(3) 359 4632
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New Zealand
Carter's Clarification of Murphy's Law.
"Things only ever go right so that they may go more spectacularly wrong later."
From this principle, all of life and physics may be deduced.
