Re: DSSSL and WYSIWYG Editing

>  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.  Draft
and preview modes in a word-processor are nothing like structure vs. WYSIWYG
view.  They're both WYSIWYG views with different trade-offs in resolution vs
paper fidelity.

I absolutely agree that WYSIWYG views can make things much more difficult to
achieve and difficult for the user to understand (e.g. what's the feedback for
an arbitrary DIV in a WYSIWYG editor?  What are the operations for manipulating
content into or out of the DIV?).  But that's the price to pay.

Terry

Received on Saturday, 10 May 1997 01:37:53 UTC