RE: DSSSL and WYSIWYG Editing

I'd have to agree with Terry about this point. I do actually think that
an increasing percentage of pages will not be authored using WYSIWYG
tools, but that being said, our experience with Word is consistant with
Terry's comments. 90% of Word users don't use styles because it requires
a top down systemic model for authoring that doesn't come naturally to
them.  That doesn't mean that Styles are a bad idea, just that it is
hard to show that Styles improve an authoring UI's usability.

> -----Original Message-----
> From:	Terje@in-Progress.com [SMTP:Terje@in-Progress.com]
> Sent:	Sunday, May 11, 1997 2:54 PM
> To:	Terry Crowley; dssslist@mulberrytech.com; Paul Prescod;
> www-style@w3.org
> Subject:	Re: DSSSL and WYSIWYG Editing
> 
> At 9:45 PM 5/9/97, Terry Crowley wrote:
> >>  You can have multiple views without one being "structured" and the
> other
> >>  "presentational". Standard word processors have "draft" and
> "preview"
> >>  modes. With more powerful stylesheet languages the gap between
> "draft"
> >>  and "preview" is larger. In the long term I think that WYSIWYG
> will take
> >>  a back seat to interface clarity and power.
> >>
> >>  In these cases, WYSIWYG would make the interface harder to
> navigate and
> >>  harder to use. In the long run I expect WYSIWYG to gradually
> become less
> >>  and less interesting. Graphical views of documents are important,
> but
> >>  views that are exactly the same as readers are not really so
> important.
> >
> >Wow.  Better put a huge caveat on the above statements.  Whose your
> target
> >user?  Sure, if it's someone whose writing content all day where the
> ability to
> >control layout easily for the document as a whole is important, the
> stylesheet
> >view is important.  For the other 99% of users, they just want
> something that
> >easily allows them to achieve the effect they're trying to achieve.
> Using a
> >stylesheet is like programming, and bottom line is that most users of
> composing
> >tools don't want to be programmers.  Using a stylesheet requires
> planning, and
> >most users don't want to plan.  They just want to write their
> content.
> 
> Quite contrary, using stylesheets require *less* planning than
> WYSIWYG.
> With a WYSIWYG approach the author/designer will have to plan the
> appearance in advance, then do the job. With a stylesheet approach,
> the
> author will do some analysis of document structure but will be free to
> play
> with the style at any time without planning. It is the stylesheet
> approach
> that allow authors just to write their content.
> 
> -- Terje <Terje@in-progress.com> | Media Design in*Progress
> 
>    Interaction makes editing Cascading Style Sheets easy...
>    Info:     http://interaction.in-progress.com/components/style
>    MacWorld: http://www.macworld.com/daily/daily.1272.html
>    MacWeek:  http://www8.zdnet.com/macweek/mw_1118/gw_cascade.html
> 
>

Received on Sunday, 11 May 1997 18:36:31 UTC