- From: Paul Prescod <papresco@calum.csclub.uwaterloo.ca>
- Date: Wed, 07 May 1997 19:23:00 -0400
- To: "www-style@w3.org" <www-style@w3.org>, "dssslist@mulberrytech.com" <dssslist@mulberrytech.com>
Greg Kostello wrote: > IMHO, people who are SGML-literate are more comfortable with structured > views of documents. Mere mortals(tm) seem frightened and confused by > structured views. 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. For instance, if I am building a document that is actually viewed as a series of hypertext scrolls, I want to edit it in a single scroll to make navigation and reorganization easy. This problem even plagues print. When I edit a two-snaking-columns document in a wordprocessor I want it to linearize it for me so that I do not have to think about the snaking. 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. Paul Prescod
Received on Wednesday, 7 May 1997 22:38:22 UTC