Re: Cleaning House

On May 3, 2007, at 6:29 AM, Philip Taylor (Webmaster) wrote:

> Why do you assume that a well-designed WYSIWYG editor would
> have a "b" button (or any similar button, for that matter) ?
> Just because the editor is WYSIWYG doesn't mean that it
> has to treat its users as idiots : present them with
> logical, extensible, semantic markup options, shew them how
> easy it is to create a new element (say, keyword), shew
> them how easy it is to render all keyword elements in bold black,
> shew them how easy it is to change the rendition to boxed red, and
> they will wonder why editing has never been so simple and so powerful.

Editors that work that way have seen little success in the market  
compared to tools with the traditional bold/italic buttons. Instead  
of leading users to wonder why editing has never been so simple and  
so powerful, they seem to make users wonder why editing is now so  
complicated and so confusing.

Now, maybe it's possible to solve that problem and make a semantic- 
oriented editor that ordinary end-users find compelling. But given  
the failure of all attempts so far, this would be a cutting-edge  
research effort, not a straightforward product development effort.

I don't think we should make the spec depend on the success of future  
research projects.

Regards,
Maciej

Received on Thursday, 3 May 2007 17:36:37 UTC